
Class TH 511 
Book.^ ■ £ b 



Coi!yrigltt"N?. 



13J3> 



Cjopmright deposit. 




EDITORIAL NOTE 

\N Essays and Criticisms the publish- 
ers present for the first time this col- 
lection of Stevenson s writings. Some 
of them have heretofore appeared in the Ed- 
inburgh and Thistle (subscription) editions, 
hut others do not appear in these editions 
and are here collected for the first time. 

All of them have heretofore appeared in 
some periodical, due credit for which is given 
on page viii. In addition the publishers wish 
to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. John 
Lane, who gave them permission to here re- 
produce the article entitled A Mountain 
Town in France. 

In many of these essays Stevenson is found 
at his best, and the reader seems to be in 
closer contact with the author than in many 
of his more finished but less intimate writ- 
ings. His walking tours are of especial in- 
terest at this time when walking and out- 
door sports are so much in vogue. 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

The essay entitled The Morality of the 
Profession of Letters is in reality his creed; 
a noble creed it is and few preachers have 
more conscientiously observed the rules laid 
down for the regulation of their lives than 
has Stevenson, in all his writings, observed 
the rules that follow : 

'' There are two duties incumbent on any 
man who enters on the business of writing: 
truth to fact and a good spirit in treatment. 
. . . Everything but prejudice should find a 
voice through him; he should see the good 
in all things; where he has even a fear that 
he does not wholly understand, there should 
he be wholly silent: and he should recogni:(e 
from the first that he has only one tool in 
his workshop, and that tool is sympathy." 




VI 



TiOlBETiT LOUIS STEVEC^CSOCIH: 

'Child of delight and heir of loveliness, 
Great friend, whose followers would fain he true.'' 

T^ichard burton 



FIRST COLLECTED EDITION 

Herbert B. Turner & Co., Boston, 1903 

Originally Published 

I Portfolio December, 

II Portfolio November, 

III Portfolio April, May, 

IV Illustrated London News 

Summer Number, 

V Cornhill Magazine May, 

VI The Studio Winter Number, 

I Fortnightly Review April, 

II Contemporary Review April, 

III Magazine of Art November, 

IV British Weekly May 13, 



I Pall Mall Gazette 

II Pall Mall Gazette 

III Pall Mall Gazette 

IV Pall Mall Gazette 



February 17, 

February 21, 

February 26, 

March 5, 



873 

874 
875 

896 
876 
896 

881 
885 
883 
887 

881 
881 
881 
881 



vm 



CONTENTS 

On the Road 

I Roads ^ 

II On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant 

Places ^ 5 

III An Autumn Effect 3^ 

IV A Winter's Walk in Carrick and 

Galloway ^9 

V Forest Notes ^7 

VI A Mountain Town in France 134 

L ilei:aij_Pa^rs 

I The Morality of the Profession 

OF Letters i 31 

II On Some Technical Elements of 

Style in Literature 178 

III A Note on Realism 212 

IV Books which have Influenced Me 224 

Swiss Notes 

I Health and Mountains 239 

II Davos in Winter 247 

III Alpine Diversions 254 

IV The Stimulation of the Alps 261 

ix 






ON THE ROAD 



ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 



E S S AY S 
AND CRITICISMS . ., , 

1 1 1 > > > > \ 1 ^ ' ' 3 * ■• ' 



1 3 X > 



'5 ','>',' ) > 






BY 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 







"BOSTON 

HE%BE%T "B. 7U%^E% & CO. 

1903 



^^6A 



'b^ 



^.W 



Copyrighted, jpoj, by 
tIerbm'.'JS.:Tu:vey & Co. 



\ 



c\^^ 



• • • ' 

• ( a 



• • • « • 



< ' f «». 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Rec«ived 

WAY 5 1903 

Copyright Entry 

class' /:t^XXc No, 

COPY A. 



7"/;^ Heini^emann Vress^ 'Boston 



ROADS 




1873 

|0 amateur will deny that he can find 
more pleasure in a single drawing, 
over which he can sit a whole quiet 
forenoon, and so gradually study himself 
into humour with the artist, than he can 
ever extra(5l from the dazzle and accumula- 
tion of incongruous impressions that send 
him, weary and stupefied, out of some fa- 
mous pi(5lure-gallery. But what is thus ad- 
mitted with regard to art is not extended to 
the (so-called) natural beauties: no amount 
of excess in sublime mountain outline or the 
graces of cultivated lowland can do any- 
thing, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade 
the palate. We are not at all sure, however, 
that moderation, and a regimen tolerably 
austere, even in scenery, are not healthful 
and strengthening to the taste; and that the 
best school for a lover of nature is not to be 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

found in one of those countries where there 
is no stage effeft — nothing sahent or sud- 
den, — but a quiet spirit of orderly and har- 
monious beauty pervades all the details, so 
that we can patiently attend to each of the 
little touches that strike in us, all of them to- 
gether, the subdued note of the landscape. 
It is in scenery such as this that we find our- 
selves in the right temper to seek out small 
sequestered loveliness. The constant recur- 
rence of similar combinations of colour and 
outline gradually forces upon us a sense of 
how the harmony has been built up, and we 
become familiar with something of nature's 
mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your 
''rural voluptuary," — not to remain awe- 
stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to 
sit deafened over the big drum in the or- 
chestra, but day by day to teach himself 
some new beauty — to experience some 
new vague and tranquil sensation that has 
before evaded him. It is not the people who 
"have pined and hungered after nature 
many a year, in the great city pent, "as Cole- 
ridge said in the poem that made Charles 
Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is not 

2 



ROADS 

those who make the greatest progress in 
this intimacy with her, or who are most 
quick to see and have the greatest gusto to 
enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is 
minute knowledge and long-continued lov- 
ing industry that make the true dilettante. 
A man must have thought much over scen- 
ery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no 
youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can 
possess itself of the last essence of beauty. 
Probably most people's heads are growing 
bare before they can see all in a landscape 
that they have the capability of seeing; and, 
even then, it will be only for one little mo- 
ment of consummation before the faculties 
are again on the decline, and they that look 
out of the windows begin to be darkened 
and restrained in sight. Thus the study of 
nature should be carried forward thoroughly 
and with system. Every gratification should 
be rolled long under the tongue, and we 
should be always eager to analyse and com- 
pare, in order that we may be able to give 
some plausible reason for our admirations. 
True, it is difficult to put even approximately 
into words the kind of feelings thus called 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

into play. There is a dangerous vice inherent 
in any such intellectual refining upon vague 
sensation. The analysis of such satisfaftions 
lends itself very readily to literary affefta- 
tions ; and we can all think of instances where 
it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid 
influence, even upon an author's choice of 
language and the turn of his sentences. And 
yet there is much that makes the attempt 
attraftive; for any expression, however im- 
perfe(5l, once given to a cherished feeling, 
seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure 
we take in it. A common sentiment is one of 
those great goods that make life palatable 
and ever new. The knowledge that another 
has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even 
if they are little things, not much otherwise 
than we have seen them, will continue to 
the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures. 
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the 
spirit we have recommended to some of the 
quieter kinds of English landscape. In those 
homely and placid agricultural districts, fa- 
miliarity will bring into relief many things 
worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly 
home to him by a sort of loving repetition; 
4 



ROADS 

such as the wonderful life-giving speed of 
windmill sails above the stationary country; 
the occurrence and recurrence of the same 
church tower at the end of one long vista 
after another: and, conspicuous among 
these sources of quiet pleasure, the character 
and variety of the road itself, along which 
he takes his way. Not only near at hand, in 
the lithe contortions with which it adapts 
itself to the interchanges of level and slope, 
but far away also, when he sees a few hun- 
dred feet of it upheaved against a hill and 
shining in the afternoon sun, he will find it 
an obje(5l so changeful and enlivening that 
he can always pleasurably busy his mind 
about it. He may leave the river-side, or fall 
out of the way of villages, but the road he 
has always with him; and, in the true hu- 
mour of observation, will find in that suffi- 
cient company. From its subtle windings 
and changes of level there arises a keen and 
continuous interest, that keeps the attention 
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive ad- 
justment to the contour of the ground, every 
little dip and swerve, seems instin(5l with 
life and an exquisite sense of balance and 

5 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

beauty. The road rolls upon the easy slopes 
of the country, like a long ship in the hol- 
lows of the sea. The very margins of waste 
ground, as they trench a little farther on the 
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of 
the hedge, have something of the same free 
delicacy of line — of the same swing and 
wilfulness. You might think for a whole 
summer's day (and not have thought it any 
nearer an end by evening) what concourse 
and succession of circumstances has pro- 
duced the least of these defledions; and it 
is, perhaps, just in this that we should look 
for the secret of their interest. A foot-path 
across a meadow — in all its human way- 
wardness and unaccountability, in all the 
grata protervitiu of its varying diredion — 
will always be more to us than a railroad 
well engineered through a difficult country.' 
No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our at- 
tention: we seem to have slipped for one 
lawless little moment out of the iron rule of 

* Compare Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and 
Hell: ** Improvement makes straight loads; but the 
crooked roads, without improvement, are roads of Ge- 
nius." 



ROADS 

cause and effed ; and so we revert at once to 
some of the pleasant old heresies of personi- 
fication, always poetically orthodox, and at- 
tribute a sort of free-will, an adive and 
spontaneous life, to the white riband of road 
that lengthens out, and bends, and cun- 
ningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the 
land before our eyes. We remember, as we 
write, some miles of fine wide highway laid 
out with conscious aesthetic artifice through 
a broken and richly cultivated trad of coun- 
try. It is said that the engineer had Hogarth's 
line of beauty in his mind as he laid them 
down. And the result is striking. One splen- 
did satisfying sweep passes with easy tran- 
sition into another, and there is nothing to 
trouble or dislocate the strong continuous- 
ness of the main line of the road. And yet 
there is something wanting. There is here 
no saving imperfection, none of those sec- 
ondary curves and little trepidations of di- 
rection that carry, in natural roads, our 
curiosity adively along with them. One feels 
at once that this road has not grown like a 
natural road, but has been laboriously made 
to pattern; and that, while a model may be 

7 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

academically correft in outline, it will al- 
ways be inanimate and cold. The traveller is 
also aware of a sympathy of mood between 
himself and the road he travels. We have all 
seen ways that have wandered into heavy 
sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily 
over the dunes like a trodden serpent: here 
we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious 
pace; and so a sympathy is preserved be- 
tween our frame of mind and the expression 
of the relaxed, heavy curves of the roadway. 
Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason 
might perhaps resolve with a little trouble. 
We might reflect that the present road had 
been developed out of a track spontaneously 
followed by generations of primitive way- 
farers; and might see in its expression a tes- 
timony that those generations had been af- 
fected at the same ground, one after another, 
in the same manner as we are affe<5ted to- 
day. Or we might carry the refledion fur- 
ther, and remind ourselves that where the 
air is invigorating and the ground firm under 
the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take 
advantage of small undulations, and he will 
turn carelessly aside from the dired way 



ROADS 

wherever there is anything beautiful to ex- 
amine or some promise of a wider view ; so 
that even a bush of wild roses may perma- 
nently bias and deform the straight path over 
the meadow; whereas, where the soil is 
heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of 
mere progression, and goes with a bowed 
head heavily and unobservantly forward. 
Reason, however, will not carry us the 
whole way; for the sentiment often recurs 
in situations where it is very hard to imagine 
any possible explanation; and indeed, if we 
drive briskly along a good, well-made road 
in an open vehicle, we shall experience this 
sympathy almost at its fullest. We feel the 
sharp settle of the springs at some curiously 
twisted corner; after a steep ascent, the fresh 
air dances in our faces as we rattle precipi- 
tately down the other side, and we find it 
difficult to avoid attributing something- 
headlong, a sort of abandon, to the road it- 
self. 

The mere winding of the path is enough 
to enhven a long day's walk in even a com- 
monplace or dreary country-side. Some- 
thing that we have seen from miles back, 

9 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, 
as we wander through folded valleys or 
among woods, that our expectation of see- 
ing it again is sharpened into a violent ap- 
petite, and as we draw nearer we impatient- 
ly quicken our steps and turn every corner 
with a beating heart. It is through these pro- 
longations of expectancy, this succession of 
one hope to another, that we live out long 
seasons of pleasure in a few hours' walk. It 
is in following these capricious sinuosities 
that we learn, only bit by bit and through 
one coquettish reticence after another, much 
as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole 
loveliness of the country. This disposition 
always preserves something new to be seen, 
and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many 
different points of distant view before it al- 
lows us finally to approach the hoped-for 
destination. 

In its connexion with the traffic, and 
whole friendly intercourse with the country, 
there is something very pleasant in that suc- 
cession of saunterers and brisk and busi- 
ness-like passers-by, that peoples our ways 
and helps to build up what Walt Whitman 

lO 



ROADS 

calls **the cheerful voice of the public road, 
the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But 
out of the great network of ways that binds 
all life together from the hill-farm to the city, 
there is something individual to mo^,, and, 
on the whole, nearly as much choice on the 
score of company as on the score of beauty 
or easy travel. On some we are never long 
without the sound of wheels, and folk pass 
us by so thickly that we lose the sense of 
their number. But on others, about little- 
frequented distrids, a meeting is an affair of 
moment; we have the sight far off of some 
one coming towards us, the growing defi- 
niteness of the person, and then the brief 
passage and salutation, and the road left 
empty in front of us for perhaps a great 
while to come. Such encounters have a wist- 
ful interest that can hardly be understood by 
the dweller in places more populous. We 
remember standing beside a countryman 
once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a 
city that was more than ordinarily crowded 
and bustling; he seemed stunned and be- 
wildered by the continual passage of differ- 
ent faces; and after a long pause, during 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

which he appeared to search for some suit- 
able expression, he said timidly that there 
seemed to be a great deal of meeting there- 
abouts. The phrase is significant. It is the 
expression of town-life in the language of 
the long, solitary country highways. A 
meeting of one with one was what this man 
had been used to in the pastoral uplands 
from which he came; and the concourse of 
the streets was in his eyes only an extraor- 
dinary multiplication of such ''meetings." 

And now we come to that last and most 
subtle quality of all, to that sense of pros- 
pe6l. of outlook, that is brought so power- 
fully to our minds by a road. In real nature 
as well as in old landscapes, beneath that 
impartial daylight in which a whole varie- 
gated plain is plunged and saturated, the 
line of the road leads the eye forth with the 
vague sense of desire up to the green limit 
of the horizon. Travel is brought home to 
us, and we visit in spirit every grove and 
hamlet that tempts us in the distance. Sehn- 
sMcht — the passion for what is ever beyond 
— is livingly expressed in that white riband 
of possible travel that severs the uneven 

12 



ROADS 

country ; not a ploughman following his 
plough up the shining furrow, not the blue 
smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is 
brought to us with a sense of nearness and 
attainability by this wavering line of junc- 
tion. There is a passionate paragraph in 
Werther that strikes the very key. '' When 
I came hither," he writes, *' how the beau- 
tiful valley invited me on every side, as I 
gazed down into it from the hill-top ! There 
the wood — ah, that I might mingle in its 
shadows! there the mountain summits — 
ah, that I might look down from them over 
the broad country! the interlinked hills! the 
secret valleys !0, to lose myself among their 
mysteries ! I hurried into the midst, and came 
back without finding aught I hoped for. 
Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast 
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; 
sight and feeling alike plunge and lose them- 
selves in the prospe6l, and we yearn to sur- 
render our whole being, and let it be filled 
full with all the rapture of one single glori- 
ous sensation; and alas! when we hasten to 
the fruition, when there is changed to here, 
all is afterwards as it was before, and we 

«3 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

stand in our indigent and cramped estate, 
and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elix- 
ir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit 
of anticipation that roads minister. Every 
little vista, every little glimpse that we have 
of what lies before us, gives the impatient 
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the 
body and already plunge into the shadow 
of the woods, and overlook from the hill- 
top the plain beyond it, and wander in the 
windings of the valleys that are still far in 
front. The road is already there — we shall 
not be long behind. It is as if we were 
marching with the rear of a great army, and, 
from far before, heard the acclamation of the 
people as the vanguard entered some friend- 
ly and jubilant city. Would not every man, 
through all the long miles of march, feel as 
if he also were within the gates? 



14 




II 

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF 
UNPLEASANT PLACES 

1874 

fT is a difficult matter to make the 
most of any given place, and we 
have much in our own power. 
Things looked at patiently from one side 
after another generally end by showing a 
side that is beautiful. A few months ago 
some words were said in the Portfolio as to 
an ** austere regimen in scenery"; and such 
a disciphne was then recommended as 
"healthful and strengthening to the taste." 
That is the text, so to speak, of the present 
essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be 
understood, is something more than a mere 
walk before breakfast to whet the appetite. 
For when we are put down in some un- 
sightly neighbourhood, and especially if we 
have come to be more or less dependent on 
what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt 

15 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

out beautiful things with all the ardour and 
patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day 
by day we perfeft ourselves in the art of see- 
ing nature more favourably. We learn to live 
with her, as people learn to live with fretful 
or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on 
what is good, and shut our eyes against all 
that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, 
also, to come to each place in the right spirit. 
The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 
''fait des discours en sot pour se soiitenir 
en chemin ' ' ; and into these discourses he 
weaves something out of all that he sees and 
suffers by the way; they take their tone 
greatly from the varying charader of the 
scene; a sharp ascent brings different 
thoughts from a level road; and the man's 
fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the 
wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery 
any more affed the thoughts than the 
thoughts aflfeft the scenery. We see places 
through our humours as through differently 
coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term 
in the equation, a note of the chord, and 
make discord or harmony almost at will. 
There is no fear for the result, if we can but 
16 



UNPLEASANT PL A CES 

surrender ourselves sufficiently to the coun- 
try that surrounds and follows us, so that 
we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or 
telling ourselves some suitable sort of story 
as we go. We become thus, in some sense, 
a centre of beauty; we are provocative of 
beauty, much as a gentle and sincere char- 
after is provocative of sincerity and gentle- 
ness in others. And even where there is no 
harmony to be elicited by the quickest and 
most obedient of spirits, we may still em- 
bellish a place with some attraftion of ro- 
mance. We may learn to go far afield for as- 
sociations, and handle them lightly when we 
have found them. Sometimes an old print 
comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot 
lit up at once with piduresque imaginations, 
by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or 
Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay 
figure for many an English lane. And 1 sup- 
pose the Trossachs would hardly be the 
Trossachs for most tourists if a man of ad- 
mirable romantic instin(ft had not peopled 
it for them with harmonious figures, and 
brought them thither with minds rightly 
prepared for the impression. There is half 

17 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the battle in this preparation. For instance: 
I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper 
spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of 
our own Highlands. 1 am happier where it 
is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased 
without trees. I understand that there are 
some phases of mental trouble that harmo- 
nise well with such surroundings, and that 
some persons, by the dispensing power of 
the imagination, can go back several centu- 
ries in spirit, and put themselves into sym- 
pathy with the hunted, houseless, unsocia- 
ble way of life that was in its place upon 
these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I 
like nature to charm me out of my sadness, 
like David before Saul; and the thought of 
these past ages strikes nothing in me but an 
unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on 
the right humour for this sort of landscape, 
and lose much pleasure in consequence. 
Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and 
time enough were given, I should have all 
manner of pleasures, and take many clear 
and beautiful images away with me when I 
left. When we cannot think ourselves into 
sympathy with the great features of a coun- 
18 



. UNPLEASANT PLACES 

try, we learn to ignore them, and put our 
head among the grass for flowers, or pore, 
for long times together, over the changeful 
current of a stream. We come down to the 
sermon in stones, when we are shut out 
from any poem in the spread landscape. We 
begin to peep and botanise, we take an in- 
terest in birds and inseds, we find many 
things beautiful in miniature. The reader 
will recoiled the little summer scene in 
IVuthering Heights — the one warm scene, 
perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable 
novel — and the great feature that is made 
therein by grasses and flowers and a little 
sunshine: this is in the spirit of which 1 now 
speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors; in- 
teriors are sometimes as beautiful, often more 
piduresque, than the shows of the open air, 
and they have that quality of shelter of which 
I shall presently have more to say. 

With all this in mind, I have often been 
tempted to put forth the paradox that any 
place is good enough to live a life in, while 
it is only in a few, and those highly fa- 
voured, that we can pass a few hours agree- 
ably. For, if we only stay long enough we 

•9 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

become at home in the neighbourhood. 
Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, 
about uninteresting corners. We forget to 
some degree the superior loveliness of other 
places, and fall into a tolerant and sympa- 
thetic spirit which is its own reward and 
justification. Looking back the other day on 
some recolledions of my own, I was aston- 
ished to fmd how much I owed to such a 
residence; six weeks in one unpleasant 
country-side had done more, it seemed, to 
quicken and educate my sensibilities than 
many years in places that jumped more 
nearly with my inclination. 

The country to which I refer was a level 
and treeless plateau, over which the winds 
cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was 
the same. A river, indeed, fell into the sea 
near the town where I resided; but the val- 
ley of the river was shallow and bald, for as 
far up as ever I had the heart to follow it. 
There were roads, certainly, but roads that 
had no beauty or interest; for, as there was 
no timber, and but little irregularity of sur- 
face, you saw your whole walk exposed to 
you from the beginning: there was nothing 
20 



UNPLEASANT PL A CES 

left to fancy, nothing to exped, nothing to 
see by the wayside, save here and there an 
unhomely-looking homestead, and here and 
there a soHtary, spectacled stone-breaker; 
and you were only accompanied, as you 
went doggedly forward, by the gaunt tele- 
graph-posts and the hum of the resonant 
wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had 
learned to know their song in warm pleas- 
ant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed 
to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker 
by suggested contrast. Even the waste 
places by the side of the road were not, as 
Hawthorne liked to put it, ''taken back to 
Nature" by any decent covering of vegeta- 
tion. Wherever the land had the chance, it 
seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny 
nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, 
coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in 
the blue transparent air; but this was of an- 
other description — this was the nakedness 
of the North ; the earth seemed to know that 
it was naked, and was ashamed and cold. 

It seemed to be always blowing on that 
coast. Indeed, this had passed into the speech 
of the inhabitants, and they saluted each 

21 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

other when they met with "Breezy, breezy, " 
instead of the customary "Fine day" of far- 
ther south. These continual winds were not 
hke the harvest breeze, that just keeps an 
equable pressure against your face as you 
walk, and serves to set all the trees talking 
over your head, or bring round you the smell 
of the wet surface of the country after a 
shower. They were of the bitter, hard, per- 
sistent sort, that interferes with sight and 
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even 
such winds as these have their own merit in 
proper time and place. It is pleasant to see 
them brandish great masses of shadow. And 
what a power they have over the colour of 
the world! How they ruffle the solid wood- 
lands in their passage, and make them shud- 
der and whiten like a single willow ! There 
is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like 
this among the woods, with all its sights and 
noises; and the effedl gets between some 
painters and their sober eyesight, so that, 
even when the rest of their picture is calm, 
the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. 
There was nothing, however, of this sort to 
be noticed in a country where there were no 

22 



UNPLEASANT PLACES 

trees and hardly any shadows, save the pas- 
sive shadows of clouds or those of rigid 
houses and walls. But the wind was never- 
theless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere 
could you taste more fully the pleasure of a 
sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. 
The reader knows what 1 mean; he must 
remember how, when he has sat himself 
down behind a dyke on a hill-side, he de- 
lighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through 
the crannies at his back; how his body 
tingled all over with warmth, and it began 
to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow sur- 
prise, that the country was beautiful, the 
heather purple, and the far-away hills all 
marbled with sun and shadow. Words- 
worth, in a beautiful passage of the "Pre- 
lude," has used this as a figure for the feeling 
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of Lon- 
don after the uproar of the great thorough- 
fares ; and the comparison may be turned the 
other way with as good effed: 

" Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, 
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn 
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook, 
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud! " 

23 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

I remember meeting a man once, in a 
train, who told me of what must have been 
quite the most perfedl instance of this pleas- 
ure of escape. He had gone up, one sunny, 
windy morning, to the top of a great cathe- 
dral somewhere abroad; 1 think it was Co- 
logne Cathedral, the great unfinished marvel 
by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark 
stairways, he issued atlast into the sunshine, 
on a platform high above the town. At that 
elevation it was quite still and warm; the 
galewasonlyinthelowerstrataoftheair,and 
he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the 
church and during his long ascent; and so 
you may judge of his surprise when, resting 
his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking 
over into the Place far below him, he saw 
the good people holding on their hats and 
leaning hard against the wind as they 
walked. There is something, to my fancy, 
quite perfect in this little experience of my 
fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem 
always very trivial to us when we find our- 
selves alone on a church-top, with the blue 
sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far be- 
low us the steep roofs and foreshortened 
24 



UNPLEASANT PLACES 

buttresses, and the silent adivity of the city 
streets; but how much more must they not 
have seemed so to him as he stood, not only 
above other men's business, but above other 
men's climate, in a golden zone like Apol- 
lo's! 

This was the sort of pleasure I found in 
the country of which I write. The pleasure 
was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in 
memory all the time, and hug oneself upon 
the shelter. And it was only by the sea that 
any such sheltered places were to be found. 
Between the black worm-eaten headlands 
there are little bights and havens, well 
screened from the wind and the commotion 
of the external sea, where the sand and 
weeds look up into the gazer's face from a 
depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, 
screaming and flickering from the ruined 
crags, alone disturb the silence and the sun- 
shine. One such place has impressed itself 
on my memory beyond all others. On a rock 
by the water's edge, old fighting men of the 
Norse breed had planted a double castle; the 
two stood wall to wall like semi-detached 
villas; and yet feud had run so high between 

25 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

their owners, that one, from out of a win- 
dow, shot the other as he stood in his own 
doorway. There is something in the juxta- 
position of these two enemies full of tragic 
irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and 
bitter women taking hateful counsel together 
about the two hall-fires at night, when the 
sea boomed against the foundations and the 
wild winter wind was loose over the battle- 
ments. And in the study we may reconstruct 
for ourselves some pale figure of what life 
then was. Not so when we are there; when 
we are there such thoughts come to us only 
to intensify a contrary impression, and as- 
sociation is turned against itself. I remem- 
ber walking thither three afternoons in suc- 
cession, my eyes weary with being set 
against the wind, and how, dropping sud- 
denly over the edge of the down, I found my- 
self in a new world of warmth and shelter. 
The wind, from which I had escaped, *'as 
from an enemy," was seemingly quite local. 
It carried no clouds with it, and came from 
such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea 
within view. The two castles, black and ru- 
inous as the rocks about them, were still dis- 
26 



UNPLEASANT PL A CES 

tinguishable from these by something more 
insecure and fantastic in the outline, some- 
thing that the last storm had left imminent 
and the next would demoHsh entirely. It 
would be difficult to render in words the 
sense of peace that took possession of me 
on these three afternoons. It was helped out, 
as I have said, by the contrast. The shore 
was battered and bemauled by previous tem- 
pests; I had the memory at heart of the in- 
sane strife of the pigmies who had eredled 
these two castles and lived in them in mu- 
tual distrust and enmity, and knew I had 
only to put my head out of this little cup of 
shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my 
eyes ; and yet there were the two great trads 
of motionless blue air and peaceful sea look- 
ing on, unconcerned and apart, at the tur- 
moil of the present moment and the memo- 
rials of the precarious past. There is ever 
something transitory and fretful in the im- 
pression of a high wind under a cloudless 
sky; it seems to have no root in the consti- 
tution of things; it must speedily begin to 
faint and wither away like a cut flower. And 
on those days the thought of the wind and 

27 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the thought of human life came very near 
together in my mind. Our noisy years did 
indeed seem moments in the being of the 
eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of 
that great field of stationary blue, was as the 
wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of 
the sea was a thing likewise to be remem- 
bered. Shelley speaks of the sea as ''hun- 
gering for calm," and in this place one 
learned to understand the phrase. Looking 
down into these green waters from the bro- 
ken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely 
in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they 
were enjoying their own tranquillity; and 
when now and again it was disturbed by a 
wind ripple on the surface, or the quick 
black passage of a fish far below, they set- 
tled back again (one could fancy) with re- 
lief. 

On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, 
everything was so subdued and still that the 
least particular struck in me a pleasurable 
surprise. The desultory crackling of the 
whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the 
ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that 
had been saturated all day long with sun- 
28 



UNPLEASANT PLACES 

shine, and now exhaled it into my face, was 
like the breath of a fellow-creature. I re- 
member that I was haunted by two lines of 
French verse; in some dumb way they 
seemed to fit my surroundings and give ex- 
pression to the contentment that was in me, 
and I kept repeating to myself — 

"Mon coeur est un luth suspendu, 
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne." 

I can give no reason why these lines came 
to me at this time; and for that very cause 
1 repeat them here. For all I know, they may 
serve to complete the impression in the mind 
of the reader, as they were certainly a part 
of it for me. 

And this happened to me in the place of 
all others where I liked least to stay. When 
I think of it I grow ashamed of my own in- 
gratitude. ''Out of the strong came forth 
sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty 
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest im- 
pression of peace. I saw the sea to be great 
and calm ; and the earth, in that little corner, 
was all alive and friendly to me. So, wher- 
ever a man is, he will find something to 
please and pacify him: in the town he will 

29 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

meet pleasant faces of men and women, and 
see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a 
cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloom- 
iest street; and for the country, there is no 
country without some amenity — let him 
only look for it in the right spirit, and he will 
surely find. 




30 




Ill 

AN AUTUMN EFFECT 

1875 

" Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque 
nous nous efforfons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement 
I'impression que nous en a vons ref ue. " — M. Andre Theu- 
RiET, " L'Automne dans les bois," T^evue des Deux 
{Mondes, 1st 06t. 1874, p. 562.^ 

COUNTRY rapidly passed through 
under favourable auspices may leave 
upon us a unity of impression that 
would only be disturbed and dissipated if we 
stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the 
quick foot. Things fall for us into a sort of 

^ I had nearly finished the transcription of the following 
pages, when 1 saw on a friend's table the number contain- 
ing the piece from which this sentence is extracted, and, 
struck with a similarity of title, took it home with me 
and read it with indescribable satisfadion. I do not know 
whether I more envy M. Theuriet the pleasure of having 
written this delightful article, or the reader the pleasure, 
which I hope he has still before him, of reading it once 
and again, and lingering over the passages that please 
him most. 

31 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

natural perspedive when we see them for a 
moment in going by; we generalise boldly 
and simply, and are gone before the sun is 
overcast, before the rain falls, before the sea- 
son can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, 
before the lights and shadows, shifting 
round towards nightfall, can show us the 
other side of things, and beHeiWhat they 
showed us in the morning. We expose our 
mind to the landscape (as we would expose 
the prepared plate in the camera) for the mo- 
ment only during which the effed endures; 
and we are away before the effed: can 
change. Hence we shall have in our memo- 
ries a long scroll of continuous wayside pic- 
tures, all imbued already with the prevailing 
sentiment of the season, the weather, and 
the landscape, and certain to be unified more 
and more, as time goes on, by the uncon- 
scious processes of thought. So that we who 
have only looked at a country over our shoul- 
der, so to speak, as we went by, will have a 
conception of it far more memorable and ar- 
ticulate than a man who has lived there all 
his life from a child upwards, and had his 
impression of to-day modified by that of to- 
32 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

morrow, and belied by that of the day after, 
till at length the stable charaderistics of the 
country are all blotted out from him behind 
the confusion of variable eflfeft. 

I began my little pilgrimage in the most 
enviable of all humours : that in which a per- 
son, with a sufficiency of money and a knap- 
sack, turns his back on a town and walks 
forward into a country of which he knows 
only by the vague report of others. Such an 
one has not surrendered his will and con- 
traded for the next hundred miles, like a 
man on a railway. He may change his mind 
at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, 
follow vague preferences freely and go the 
low road or the high, choose the shadow or 
the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by 
the lane that turns immediately into the 
woods, or the broad road that lies open be- 
fore him into the distance, and shows him 
the far-off spires of some city, or a range of 
mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, 
along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify 
his every whim and fancy, without a pang 
of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to 
his self-resped. It is true, however, that most 

33 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

men do not possess the faculty of free adlion, 
the priceless gift of being able to live for the 
moment only; and as they begin to go for- 
ward on their journey, they will find that 
they have made for themselves new fetters. 
Slight projects they may have entertained 
for a moment, half in jest, become iron laws 
to them, they know not why. They will be 
led by the nose by these vague reports of 
which I spoke above; and the mere faftthat 
their informant mentioned one village and 
not another will compel their footsteps with 
inexplicable power. And yet a little while, 
yet a few days of this fiditious liberty, and 
they will begin to hear imperious voices call- 
ing on them to return; and some passion, 
some duty, some worthy or unworthy ex- 
peflation, will set its hand upon their shoul- 
der and lead them back into the old paths. 
Once and again we have all made the experi- 
ment. We know the end of it right well. And 
yet if we make it for the hundredth time to- 
morrow, it will have the same charm as ever ; 
our heart will beat and our eyes will be 
bright, as we leave the town behind us, and 
we shall feel once again (as we have felt so 
34 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

often before) that we are cutting ourselves 
loose for ever from our whole past life, with 
all its sins and follies and circumscriptions, 
and go forward as a new creature into a new 
world. 

It was well, perhaps, that I had this first 
enthusiasm to encourage me up the long hill 
above High Wycombe; for the day was a 
bad day for walking at best, and now began 
to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and 
lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, 
and its colour readed on the colour of the 
landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedge- 
row trees were still fairly green, shot 
through with bright autumnal yellows, 
bright as sunshine. But a little way off, the 
solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely 
on slope and hill-top were not green, but 
russet and grey, and ever less russet and 
more grey as they drew off into the distance. 
As they drew off into the distance, also, the 
woods seemed to mass themselves together, 
and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon 
the limit of one's view. Not that this mass- 
ing was complete, or gave the idea of any 
extent of forest, for every here and there the 

3>5 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

trees would break up and go down into a 
valley in open order, or stand in long Indian 
file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, 
foolishly enough, against the sky. I say fool- 
ishly enough, although I have seen the effedl 
employed cleverly in art, and such long line 
of single trees thrown out against the cus- 
tomary sunset of a Japanese pi6ture with a 
certain fantastic eflfed that was not to be de- 
spised; but this was over water and level 
land, where it did not jar, as here, with the 
soft contour of hills and valleys. The whole 
scene had an indefinable look of being 
painted, the colour was so abstract and cor- 
real, and there was something so sketchy 
and merely impressional about these distant 
single trees on the horizon that one was 
forced to think of it all as of a clever French 
landscape. For it is rather in nature that we 
see resemblance to art, than in art to nature; 
and we say a hundred times, ''How like a 
picture!" for once that we say, "How like 
the truth ! " The forms in which we learn to 
think of landscape are forms that we have 
got from painted canvas. Any man can see 
and understand a pidlure; it is reserved for 
36 



AJV A UTUMN EFFECT 

the few to separate anything out of the con- 
fusion of nature, and see that distincflly and 
with intelligence. 

The sun came out before I had been long 
on my way ; and as I had got by that time 
to the top of the ascent, and was now tread- 
ing a labyrinth of confined by-roads, my 
whole view brightened considerably in col- 
our, for it was the distance only that was 
grey and cold, and the distance I could see 
no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful 
carolling of larks which seemed to follow me 
as I went. Indeed, during all the time 1 was 
in that country the larks did not desert me. 
The air was alive with them from High Wy- 
combe to Tring; and as, day after day, their 
"shrill delight" fell upon me out of the va- 
cant sky, they began to take such a prom- 
inence over other conditions, and form so 
integral a part of my conception of the coun- 
try, that I could have baptised it * ' The Coun- 
try of Larks." This, of course, might just as 
well have been in early spring; but every- 
thing else was deeply imbued with the senti- 
ment of the later year. There was no stir of 
insefts in the grass. The sunshine was more 

37 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

golden, and gave less heat than summer sun- 
shine; and the shadows under the hedge 
were somewhat blue and misty. It was only 
in autumn that you could have seen the min- 
gled green and yellow of the elm foHage, and 
the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and 
covered the surface of wayside pools so 
thickly that the sun was reflected only here 
and there from little joints and pinholes in 
that brown coat of proof; or that your ear 
would have been troubled, as you went for- 
ward, by the occasional report of fowling- 
pieces from all diredions and all degrees of 
distance. 

For a long time this dropping fire was the 
one sign of human adivity that came to dis- 
turb me as I walked. The lanes were pro- 
foundly still. They would have been sad but 
for the sunshine and the singing of the larks. 
And as it was, there came over me at times 
a feeling of isolation that was not disagreea- 
ble, and yet was enough to make me quicken 
my steps eagerly when I saw some one be- 
fore me on the road. This fellow-voyager 
proved to be no less a person than the parish 
constable. It had occurred to me that in a 
3^ 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

distrift which was so little populous and so 
well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence 
might play hide-and-seek with the authori- 
ties for months; and this idea was strength- 
ened by the aspect of the portly constable 
as he walked by my side with dehberate dig- 
nity and turned-out toes. But a few minutes' 
converse set my heart at rest. These rural 
criminals are very tame birds, it appeared. 
If my informant did not immediately lay his 
hand on an offender, he was content to 
wait; some evening after nightfall there 
would come a tap at his door, and the out- 
law, weary of outlawry, would give himself 
quietly up to undergo sentence, and resume 
his position in the life of the country-side. 
Married men caused him no disquietude 
whatever; he had them fast by the foot. 
Sooner or later they would come back to 
see their wives, a peeping neighbour would 
pass the word, and my portly constable 
would walk quietly over and take the bird 
sitting. And if there were a few who had no 
particular ties in the neighbourhood, and pre- 
ferred to shift into another county when they 
fell into trouble, their departure moved the 

39 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

placid constable in no degree. He was of 
Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not 
stand in the Prince's name, he took no note 
of him, but let him go, and thanked God he 
was rid of a knave. And surely the crime 
and the law were in admirable keeping ; rus- 
tic constable was well met with rustic of- 
fender. The officer sitting at home over a bit 
of fire until the criminal came to visit him, 
and the criminal coming — it was a fair 
match. One felt as if this must have been the 
order in that delightful seaboard Bohemia 
where Florizel and Perdita courted in such 
sweet accents, and the Puritan sang psalms 
to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shear- 
ers danced with nosegays in their bosoms, 
and chanted their three songs apiece at the 
old shepherd's festival; and one could not 
help pi6turing to oneself what havoc among 
good people's purses, and tribulation for be- 
nignant constables, might be worked here 
by the arrival, over stile and footpath, of a 
new Autolycus. 

Bidding good-morning to my fellow-trav- 
eller, I left the road and struck across coun- 
try. It was rather a revelation to pass from 
40 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

between the hedgerows and find quite a 
bustle on the other side, a great coming and 
going ofschool-children upon by-paths, and, 
in every second field, lusty horses and stout 
country-folk a-ploughing. The way I fol- 
lowed took me through many fields thus oc- 
cupied, and through many strips of planta- 
tion, and then over a little space of smooth 
turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with tall 
fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making 
ready for the winter, and so back again into 
the quiet road. I was now not far from the 
end of my day's journey. A few hundred 
yards farther, and, passing through a gap in 
the hedge, I began to go down hill through 
a pretty extensive traft of young beeches. 
I was soon in shadow myself, but the after- 
noon sun still coloured the upmost boughs 
of the wood, and made a fire over my head 
in the autumnal foliage. A little faint vapour 
lay among the sHm tree-stems in the bottom 
of the hollow; and from farther up I heard 
from time to time an outburst of gross laugh- 
ter, as though clowns were making merry 
in the bush. There was something about 
the atmosphere that brought all sights and 

4» 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

sounds home to one with a singular purity, 
so that I felt as if my senses had been washed 
with water. After I had crossed the little zone 
of mist, the path began to remount the hill; 
and just as I, mounting along with it, had 
got back again, from the head downwards, 
into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front 
of me a donkey tied to a tree. Now, I have 
a certain hking for donkeys, principally, I 
believe, because of the delightful things that 
Sterne has written of them. But this was not 
after the pattern of the ass at Lyons. He was 
of a white colour, that seemed to fit him 
rather for rare festal occasions than for con- 
stant drudgery. Besides, he was very small, 
and of the daintiest proportions you can im- 
agine in a donkey. And so, sure enough, 
you had only to look at him to see he had 
never worked. There was something too 
roguish and wanton in his face, a look too 
like that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to 
have survived much cudgelling. It was plain 
that these feet had kicked off sportive chil- 
dren oftener than they had plodded with a 
freight through miry lanes. He was alto- 
gether a fme-weather, holiday sort of don- 
42 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

key ; and though he was just then somewhat 
solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of 
the levity of his disposition by impudently 
wagging his ears at me as I drew near. I say 
he was somewhat solemnised just then ; for, 
with the admirable instind of all men and 
animals under restraint, he had so wound 
and wound the halter about the tree that he 
could go neither back nor forwards, nor so 
much as put down his head to browse. There 
he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, part 
angry, part, I believe, amused. He had not 
given up hope, and dully revolved the prob- 
lem in his head, giving ever and again an- 
other jerk at the few inches of free rope that 
still remained unwound. A humorous sort of 
sympathy for the creature took hold upon 
me. I went up, and, not without some trou- 
ble on my part, and much distrust and re- 
sistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced 
backwards until the whole length of the 
halter was set loose, and he was once more 
as free a donkey as I dared to make him. I 
was pleased (as people are) with this friendly 
action to a fellow-creature in tribulation, and 
glanced back over my shoulder to see how 

43 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

he was profiting by his freedom. The brute 
was looking after me; and no sooner did he 
catch my eye than he put up his long white 
face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth 
at me, and began to bray derisively. If ever 
any one person made a grimace at another, 
that donkey made a grimace at me. The 
hardened ingratitude of his behaviour, and 
the impertinence that inspired his whole 
face as he curled up his lip, and showed his 
teeth, and began to bray, so tickled me, and 
was so much in keeping with what I had 
imagined to myself about his charader, that 
I could not find it in my heart to be angry, 
and burst into a peal of hearty laughter. This 
seemed to strike the ass as a repartee, so he 
brayed at me again by way of rejoinder; and 
we went on for a while, braying and laugh- 
ing, until I began to grow a-weary of it, and, 
shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pur- 
sue my way. In so doing — it was like go- 
ing suddenly into cold water — I found my- 
self face to face with a prim little old maid. 
She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear ! 
She had concluded beyond question that this 
must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud 
44 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods. 
I was sure, by her face, that she had already 
recommended her spirit most religiously to 
Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst. 
And so, to reassure her, I uncovered and be- 
sought her, after a very staid fashion, to put 
me on my way to Great Missenden. Her 
voice trembled a little, to be sure, but I think 
her mind was set at rest; and she told me, 
very explicitly, to follow the path until I 
came to the end of the wood, and then I 
should see the village below me in the bot- 
tom of the valley. And, with mutual courte- 
sies, the little old maid and I went on our 
respedive ways. 

Nor had she misled me. Great Missenden 
was close at hand, as she had said, in the 
trough of a gentle valley, with many great 
elms about it. The smoke from its chimneys 
went up pleasantly in the afternoon sun- 
shine. The sleepy hum of a threshing-ma- 
chine filled the neighbouring fields and hung 
about the quaint street corners. A little 
above, the church sits well back on its 
haunches against the hill-side — an attitude 
for a church, you know, that makes it look 

45 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

as if it could be ever so much higher if it 
liked; and the trees grew about it thickly, so 
as to make a density of shade in the church- 
yard. A very quiet place it looks; and yet I 
saw many boards and posters about threat- 
ening dire punishment against those who 
broke the church windows or defaced the 
precind, and offering rewards for the appre- 
hension of those who had done the like al- 
ready. It was fair day in Great Missenden. 
There were three stalls set up, sub jove, for 
the sale of pastry and cheap toys ; and a great 
number of holiday children thronged about 
the stalls and noisily invaded every corner of 
the straggling village. They came round me 
by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon 
penny trumpets as though they imagined I 
should fall to pieces like the battlements of 
Jericho. I noticed one among them who could 
make a wheel of himself like a London boy, 
and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence 
upon the strength of the accomplishment. 
By-and-by, however, the trumpets began to 
weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the 
fair, I fancy, at its height. 
Night had fallen before 1 ventured forth 
46 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

again. It was pitch-dark in the village street, 
and the darkness seemed only the greater 
for a light here and there in an uncurtained 
window or from an open door. Into one such 
window 1 was rude enough to peep, and 
saw within a charming genre pidure. In a 
room, all white wainscot and crimson wall- 
paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, 
empty darkness in which I had been groping, 
a pretty girl was telling a story, as well as I 
could make out, to an attentive child upon 
her knee, while an old woman sat placidly 
dozing over the fire. You may be sure I was 
not behindhand with a story for myself — a 
good old story after the manner of G. P. R. 
James and the village melodramas, with a 
wicked squire, and poachers, and an attor- 
ney, and a virtuous young man with a ge- 
nius for mechanics, who should love, and 
proted, and ultimately marry the girl in the 
crimson room. Baudelaire has a few dainty 
sentences on the fancies that we are inspired 
with when we look through a window into 
other people's lives; and I think Dickens has 
somewhere enlarged on the same text. The 
subjed, at least, is one that I am seldom 

47 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

weary of entertaining. I remember, night 
after night, at Brussels, watching a good 
family sup together, make merry, and retire 
to rest; and night after night I waited to see 
the candles lit, and the salad made, and the 
last salutations dutifully exchanged, without 
any abatement of interest. Night after night 
I found the scene rivet my attention and keep 
me awake in bed with all manner of quaint 
imaginations. Much of the pleasure of the 
Arabian Nights hinges upon this Asmodean 
interest; and we are not weary of lifting 
other people's roofs, and going about behind 
the scenes of life with the Caliph and the 
serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, 
besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves 
and see people living together in perfeft un- 
consciousness of our existence, as they will 
live when we are gone. If to-morrow the 
blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is 
realised, the girl will none the less tell stories 
to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great 
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their 
candle, and mix their salad, and go orderly 
to bed. 
The next morning was sunny overhead 
48 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

and damp underfoot, with a thrill in the air 
like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into 
the sloping garden' behind the inn and 
smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the 
tune of my landlady's lamentations oversun- 
dry cabbages and cauliflowers that had been 
spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much 
pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see 
the garden all hovered over by white butter- 
flies. And now, look at the end of it! She 
could nowise reconcile this with her moral 
sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies 
are created with a side-look to the composi- 
tion of improving apologues, it is not alto- 
gether easy, even for people who have read 
Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly 
upon the issue raised. Then I fell into along 
and abstruse calculation with my landlord; 
having for objeft to compare the distance 
driven by him during eight years' service on 
the box of the Wendover coach with the 
girthoftheroundworlditself. We tackled the 
question most conscientiously, made all nec- 
essary allowance for Sundays and leap-years, 
and were just coming to a triumphant con- 
clusion of our labours when we were stayed 

49 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

by a small lacuna in my information. I did 
not know the circumference of the earth. 
The landlord knew it, to be sure — plainly 
he had made the same calculation twice and 
once before, — but he wanted confidence in 
his own figures, and from the moment I 
showed myself so poor a second seemed to 
lose all interest in the result. 

Wendover (which was my next stage) 
lies in the same valley with Great Missenden, 
but at the foot of it, where the hills trend oflf 
on either hand like a coast-line, and a great 
hemisphere of plain lies, like a sea, before 
one, 1 went up a chalky road, until I had a 
good outlook over the place. The vale, as it 
opened out into the plain, was shallow, and 
a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful con- 
volutions. From the level to which I have 
now attained the fields were exposed before 
me like a map, and I could see all that bustle 
of autumn field-work which had been hid 
from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, 
or shown to me only for a moment as I fol- 
lowed the footpath. Wendover lay well 
down in the midst, with mountains of foliage 
about it. The great plain stretched away to 
50 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

the northward, variegated near at hand with 
the quaint pattern of the fields, but growing 
ever more and more indistinct, until it be- 
came a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright 
crescents of river, and snatches of slanting 
road, and finally melted into the ambiguous 
cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was 
an opal-grey, touched here and there with 
blue, and with certain faint russets that 
looked as if they were reflexions of the 
colour of the autumnal woods below. I 
could hear the ploughmen shouting to their 
horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks in- 
numerable overhead, and, from a field where 
the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a 
sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All 
these noises came to me very thin and dis- 
tin6l in the clear air. There was a wonderful 
sentiment of distance and atmosphere about 
the day and the place. 

I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough 
staircase of chalky footholds cut in the turf. 
The hills about Wendover and, as far as I 
could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, 
wear a sort of hood of beech plantation ; but 
in this particular case the hood had been suf- 

51 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

fered to extend itself into something more 
like a cloak, and hung down about the 
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of 
lying flatly along the summit. The trees 
grew so close, and their boughs were so 
matted together, that the whole wood 
looked as dense as a bush of heather. The 
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering 
red, touched hert and there with vivid yel- 
low. But the autumn had scarce advanced be- 
yond the outworks; it was still almost sum- 
mer in the heart of the wood ; and as soon as 
I had scrambled through the hedge, I found 
myself in a dim green forest atmosphere un- 
der eaves of virgin foliage. In places where 
the wood had itself for a background and 
the trees were massed together thickly, the 
colour became intensified and almost gem- 
like : a perfect fire of green, that seemed none 
the less green for a few specks of autumn 
gold. None of the trees were of any con- 
siderable age or stature; but they grew well 
together, I have said; and as the road turned 
and wound among them, they fell into 
pleasant groupings and broke the light up 
pleasantly. Sometimes there would be acol- 
52 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

onnade of slim, straight tree-stems with the 
light running down them as down the shafts 
of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to 
something, and led only to a corner of som- 
bre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray 
of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, 
the light lying flatly along the top of it, so 
that against a dark background it seemed 
almost luminous. There was a great hush 
over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of 
a thicket than a wood) ; and the vague ru- 
mours that went among the tree-tops, and 
the occasional rustling of big birds or hares 
among the undergrowth, had in them a note 
of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put 
the imagination on its guard and made me 
walk warily on the russet carpeting of last 
year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed 
to be all attention; the wood listened as I 
went, and held its breath to number my foot- 
falls. One could not help feeling that there 
ought to be some reason for this stillness; 
whether, as the bright old legend goes. Pan 
lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether, 
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, 
and the first drops would soon come patter- 

5^ 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

ing through the leaves. It was not unpleas- 
ant, in such an humour, to catch sight, ever 
and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. 
This happened only where the path lay 
much upon the slope, and there was a flaw 
in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some 
distance below the level at which I chanced 
myself to be walking; then, indeed, little 
scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature 
fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow 
trees would appear for a momentin the aper- 
ture, and grow larger and smaller, and 
change and melt one into another, as I con- 
tinued to go forward, and so shift my point 
of view. 

For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from 
somewhere before me in the wood a strange, 
continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, 
and gobbling, now and again interrupted by 
a harsh scream. As 1 advanced towards this 
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, 
and 1 caught sight, through the trees, of 
sundry gables and enclosure walls, and 
something like the tops of a rickyard. And 
sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and 
a neat little farm-steading, with the beech- 
54 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

woods growing almost to the door of it. Just 
before me, however, as I came up the path, 
the trees drew back and let in a wide flood 
of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here 
that the noises had their origin. More than a 
score of peacocks (there are altogether thirty 
at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, 
and a great multitude that I could not num- 
ber of more ordinary barn-door fowls, were 
all feeding together on this little open lawn 
among the beeches. They fed in a dense 
crowd, which swayed to and fro, and came 
hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of 
which the surface was agitated like the sur- 
face of a sea as each bird guzzled his head 
along the ground after the scattered corn. 
The clucking, cooing noise that had led me 
thither was formed by the blending together 
of countless expressions of individual con- 
tentment into one colle6live expression of 
contentment, or general grace during meat. 
Every now and again a big peacock would 
separate himself from the mob and take a 
stately turn or two about the lawn, or per- 
haps mount for a moment upon the rail, and 
there shrilly publish to the world his satis- 

55 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

fadion with himself and what he had to eat. 
It happened, for my sins, that none of these 
admirable birds had anything beyond the 
merest rudiment of a tail. Tails, it seemed, 
were out of season just then. But they had 
their necks for all that; and by their necks 
alone they do as much surpass all the other 
birds of our grey climate as they fall in qual- 
ity of song below the blackbird or the lark. 
Surely the peacock, with its incomparable 
parade of glorious colour and the scrannel 
voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from 
its painted throat, must, like my landlady's 
butterflies at Great Missenden, have been 
invented by some skilful fabulist for the con- 
solation and support of homely virtue: or 
rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so 
skilful, who made points for the moment 
without having a studious enough eye to the 
complete effe6l; for I thought these melting 
greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, 
that I would have given them my vote just 
then before the sweetest pipe in all the 
spring woods. For indeed there is no piece 
of colour of the same extent in nature, that 
will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man's 
56 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

eyes; and to come upon so many of them, 
after these acres of stone-coloured heavens 
and russet woods, and grey-brown plough- 
lands and white roads, was like going three 
whole days' journey to the southward, or a 
month back into the summer. 

I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm — for 
so the place is called, after the name of its 
splendid pensioners — and go forwards 
again in the quiet woods. It began to grow 
both damp and dusk under the beeches; and 
as the day declined the colour faded out of the 
foliage ; and shadow, without form and void, 
took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves 
and delicate gradations of living green that 
had before accompanied my walk. I had 
been sorry to leave Peacock Farm, but 1 was 
not sorry to find myself once more in the 
open road, under a pale and somewhat 
troubled-looking evening sky, and put my 
best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover. 

Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, pur- 
poseless sort of place. Everybody seems to 
have had his own opinion as to how the 
street should go; or rather, every now and 
then a man seems to have arisen with a new 

57 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

idea on the subjed, and led away a little se£l 
of neighbours to join in his heresy. It would 
have somewhat the look of an abortive 
watering-place, such as we may now see 
them here and there along the coast, but for 
the age of the houses, the comely quiet de- 
sign of some of them, and the look of long 
habitation, of a life that is settled and rooted, 
and makes it worth while to train flowers 
about the windows, and otherwise shape the 
dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. 
The church, which might perhaps have 
served as rallying-point for these loose 
houses, and pulled the township into some- 
thing like intelligible unity, stands some dis- 
tance off among great trees; but the inn (to 
take the public buildings in order of import- 
ance) is in what I understand to be the prin- 
cipal street: a pleasant old house, with bay- 
windows, and three peaked gables, and 
many swallows' nests plastered about the 
eaves. 

The interior of the inn was answerable to 

the outside: indeed, 1 never saw any room 

much more to be admired than the low 

wainscoted parlour in which I spent the re- 

58 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

mainder of the evening. It was ashort oblong 
in shape, save that the fireplace was built 
across one of the angles so as to cut it par- 
tially off, and the opposite angle was simi- 
larly truncated by a corner cupboard. The 
wainscot was white, and there was a Turkey 
carpet on the floor, so old that it might have 
been imported by Walter Shandy before he 
retired, worn almost through in some places, 
but in others making a good show of blues 
and oranges, none the less harmonious for 
being somewhatfaded. The corner cupboard 
was agreeable in design ; and there were just 
the right things upon the shelves — decan- 
ters and tumblers, and blue plates, and one 
red rose in a glass of water. The furniture 
was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was 
in keeping, down to the ponderous leaden 
inkstand on the round table. And you may 
fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and 
flickered over by the light of a brisk com- 
panionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted 
sort of perspective, in the three compart- 
ments of the old mirror above the chimney. 
As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept 
looking round with the tail of my eye at the 

59 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

quaint, bright pidure that was about me, and 
could not help some pleasure and a certain 
childish pride in forming part of it. The book 
I read was about Italy in the early Renais- 
sance, the pageantries and the light loves of 
princes, the passion of men for learning, and 
poetry, and art ; but it was written, by good 
luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suit- 
ed the room infinitely more nearly than the 
matter; and the result was that I thought 
less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lorenzo, or 
Politian, than of the good Englishman who 
had written in that volume what he knew 
of them, and taken so much pleasure in his 
solemn polysyllables. 

I was not left without society. My landlord 
had a very pretty little daughter, whom we 
shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at 
the time, I might be able to tell you some- 
thing definite of her appearance. But faces 
have a trick of growing more and more spir- 
itualised and abstrafl in the memory, until 
nothing remains of them but a look, a haunt- 
ing expression; just that secret quality in a 
face that is apt to slip out somehow under 
the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the 
60 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

portrait dead for the lack of it. And if it is 
hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair 
pencils, you may think how hopeless it must 
be to pursue after it with clumsy words. If I 
say, for instance, that this look, which I re- 
member as Lizzie, was something wistful 
that seemed partly to come of slyness and in 
part of simplicity, and that 1 am inchned to 
imagine it had something to do with the 
daintiest suspicion of a cast in one of her 
large eyes, 1 shall have said all that I can, and 
the reader will not be much advanced to- 
wards comprehension. I had struck up an 
acquaintance with this little damsel in the 
morning, and professed much interest in her 
dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large 
one which was kept locked away for great 
occasions. And so I had not been very long 
in the parlour before the door opened, and 
in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked 
clumsily under her arm. She was followed 
by her brother John, a year or so younger 
than herself, not simply to play propriety at 
our interview, but to show his own two 
whips in emulation of his sister's dolls. I did 
my best to make myself agreeable to my 

6i 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

visitors, showing much admiration for the 
dolls and dolls' dresses, and, with a very 
serious demeanour, asking many questions 
about their age and character. 1 do not think 
that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity, but it 
was evident that she was both bewildered 
and a little contemptuous. Although she was 
ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were 
ahve, she seemed to think rather poorly of 
any grown person who could fall heartily 
into the spirit of the fi(5lion. Sometimes she 
would look at me with gravity and a sort of 
disquietude, as though she really feared I 
must be out of my wits. Sometimes, as when 
I inquired too particularly into the question 
of their names, she laughed at me so long 
and heartily that 1 began to feel almost em- 
barrassed. But when, in an evil moment, I 
asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she 
could keep herself no longer to herself. 
Clambering down from the chair on which 
she sat perched to show me, Corneha-like, 
her jewels, she ran straight out of the room 
and into the bar — it was just across the pas- 
sage, — and I could hear her telling her 
mother in loud tones, but apparently more 
62 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

in sorrow than in merriment, that the gentle- 
man in the parlour wanted to kiss Dolly. I 
fancy she was determined to save me from 
this humihating adion, even in spite of my- 
self, for she never gave me the desired per- 
mission. She reminded me of an old dog I 
once knew, who would never suffer the 
master of the house to dance, out of an ex- 
aggerated sense of the dignity of that mas- 
ter's place and carriage. 

After the young people were gone there 
was but one more incident ere I went to bed. 
I heard a party of children go up and down 
the dark street for a while, singing together 
sweetly. And the mystery of this little inci- 
dent was so pleasant to me that I purposely 
refrained from asking who they were, and 
wherefore they went singing at so late an 
hour. One can rarely be in a pleasant place 
without meeting with some pleasant acci- 
dent. I have a convidion that these children 
would not have gone singing before the inn 
unless the inn-parlour had been the delight- 
ful place it was. At least, if I had been in the 
customary public room of the modern hotel, 
with all its disproportions and discomforts, 

63 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

my ears would have been dull, and there 
would have been some ugly temper or other 
uppermost in my spirit, and so they would 
have wasted their songs upon an unworthy 
hearer. 

Next morning I went along to visit the 
church. It is a long-backed red-and-white 
building, very much restored, and stands in 
a pleasant graveyard among those great 
trees of which I have spoken already. The 
sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again 
pulses of cold wind went about the enclo- 
sure, and set the branches busy overhead, 
and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles 
of the church buttresses. Now and again, 
also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a 
chestnut among the grass — 'the dog would 
bark before the reftory door — or there would 
come a clinking of pails from the stable-yard 
behind. But in spite of these occasional in- 
terruptions — in spite, also, of the continu- 
ous autumn twittering that filled the trees — ■ 
the chief impression somehow was one as of 
utter silence, insomuch that the little green- 
ish bell that peeped out of a window in the 
tower disquieted me with a sense of some 
64 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

possible and more inharmonious disturb- 
ance. The grass was wet, as if with a hoar- 
frost that had just been melted. I do not 
know that ever I saw a morning more au- 
tumnal. As 1 went to and fro among the 
graves, I saw some flowers set reverently 
before a recently ere(fted tomb, and drawing 
near was almost startled to find they lay on 
the grave of a man seventy-two years old 
when he died. We are accustomed to strew 
flowers only over the young, where love has 
been cut short untimely, and great possibil- 
ities have been restrained by death. We 
strew them there in token that these possi- 
bilities, in some deeper sense, shall yet be 
realised, and the touch of our dead loves re- 
main with us and guide us to the end. And 
yet there was more significance, perhaps, 
and perhaps a greater consolation, in this 
little nosegay on the grave of one who had 
died old. We are apt to make so much of the 
tragedy of death, and think so little of the 
enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that 
we see more to lament for in a life cut off in 
the midst of usefulness and love, than in one 
that miserably survives all love and useful- 

65 



ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 

ness, and goes about the world the phantom 
of itself, without hope, or joy, or any con- 
solation. These flowers seemed not so much 
the token of love that survived death, as of 
something yet more beautiful — of love that 
had lived a man's life out to an end with 
him, and been faithful and companionable, 
and not weary of loving, throughout all 
these years. 

The morning cleared a little, and the sky 
was once more the old stone-coloured vault 
over the sallow meadows and the russet 
woods, as 1 set forth on a dog-cart from 
Wendover to Tring. The road lay for a good 
distance along the side of the hills, with the 
great plain below on one hand, and the 
beech-woods above on the other. The fields 
were busy with people ploughing and sow- 
ing; every here and there a jug of ale stood 
in the angle of the hedge, and 1 could see 
many a team wait smoking in the furrow as 
ploughman or sower stepped aside for a mo- 
ment to take a draught. Over all the brown 
ploughlands, and under all the leafless 
hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour 
abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic. 
66 



AN A UTUMN EFFECT 

The horses smoked and the men laboured 
and shouted and drank in the sharp autumn 
morning; so that one had a strong effe6l of 
large, open-air existence. The fellow who 
drove me was something of a humourist; 
and his conversation was all in praise of an 
agricultural labourer's way of life. It was he 
who called my attention to these jugs of ale 
by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently 
express the liberality of these men's wages; 
he told me how sharp an appetite was given 
by breaking up the earth in the morning air, 
whether with plough or spade, and cordially 
admired this provision of nature. He sang O 
forttinatos agricolas! indeed, in every possi- 
ble key, and with many cunning inflei^ions, 
till I began to wonder what was the use of 
such people as Mr. Arch, and to sing the 
same air myself in a more diffident manner. 
Tring was reached, and then Tring rail- 
way-station ; for the two are not very near, 
the good people of Tring having held the 
railway, of old days, in extreme apprehen- 
sion, lest some day it should break loose in 
the town and work mischief. I had a last 
walk, among russet beeches as usual, and 

67 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of 
larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and 
saw, as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, 
two horsemen exercising a pack of fox- 
hounds. And then the train came and carried 
me back to London. 




68 



IV 




A WINTER'S WALK IN CAR- 
RICK AND GALLOWAY 

A Fragment : i8y6 

T the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, 
the central district of the shire of 
Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most 
southerly. On the Carrick side of the river 
rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, 
cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and 
there with farms and tufts of wood. Inland, it 
loses itself, joining, 1 suppose, the great herd 
of similar hills that occupies the centre of the 
Lowlands. Towards the sea, it swells out the 
coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay- 
window in a plan, and is fortified against the 
surf behind bold crags. This hill is known as 
the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, 
Brown Carrick. 

It had snowed overnight. The fields were 
all sheeted up; they were tucked in among 
the snow, and their shape was modelled 

69 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

through the pliant counterpane, like children 
tucked in by a fond mother. The wind had 
made ripples and folds upon the surface, like 
what the sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon 
the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. 
An effusion of coppery light on the summit 
of Brown Carrick showed where the sun 
was trying to look through ; but along the 
horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, 
so that there was no distinction of sky and 
sea. Over the white shoulders of the head- 
lands, or in the opening of bays, there was 
nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; 
and the road as it drew near the edge of the 
cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation 
and void space. 

The snow crunched under foot, and at 
farms all the dogs broke out barking as they 
smelt a passer-by upon the road. 1 met a fine 
old fellow, who might have sat as the father 
in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and who 
swore most heathenishly at a cow he was 
driving. And a little after I scraped acquaint- 
ance with a poor body tramping out to 
gather cockles. His face was wrinkled by ex- 
posure; it was broken up into flakes and 
70 



A WINTERS WALK 

channels, like mud beginning to dry, and 
weathered in two colours, an incongruous 
pink and grey. He had a faint air of being 
surprised — which, God knows, he might 
well be — that life had gone so ill with him. 
The shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, 
so strangely were they bagged and ravelled 
about his knees; and his coat was all be- 
daubed with clay as though he had lain in a 
rain-dub during the New Year's festivity. I 
will own I was not sorry to think he had had 
a merry New Year, and been young again for 
an evening; but I was sorry to see the mark 
still there. One could not expert such an old 
gentleman to be much of a dandy, or a great 
student of respeftability in dress; but there 
might have been a wife at home, who had 
brushed out similar stains after fifty New 
Years, now become old, or a round-armed 
daughter, who would wish to have him 
neat, were it only out of self-respeft and for 
the ploughman sweetheart when he looks 
round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of 
this in his life, and years and loneliness hung 
heavily on his old arms. He was seventy-six, 
he told me; and nobody would give a day's 

7« 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

work to a man that age: they would think 
he couldn't do it. "And, 'deed," he went on, 
with a sad little chuckle, " 'deed, I doubt if I 
could." He said good-bye to me at a foot- 
path, and crippled wearily off to his work. 
It will make your heart ache if you think of 
his old fingers groping in the snow. 

He told me 1 was to turn down beside the 
school-house for Dunure. And so, when I 
found a lone house among the snow, and 
heard a babble of childish voices from with- 
in, I struck off into a steep road leading 
downwards to the sea. Dunure lies close un- 
der the steep hill : a haven among the rocks, a 
breakwater in consummate disrepair, much 
apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so 
of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few shards of 
ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, 
and one tall gable honeycombed with win- 
dows. The snow lay on the beach to the tide- 
mark. It was daubed on to the sills of theruin : 
it roosted in the crannies of the rock like 
white sea-birds ; even on outlyingreefs there 
wouldbea little cock of snow, like a toy light- 
house. Everything was grey and white in a 
cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid. 
72 



A WINTERS WALK 

In the profound silence, broken only by the 
noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded 
twice ; and I saw the postman, girt with two 
bags, pause a moment at the end of the cla- 
chan for letters. It is, perhaps, chara6leristic 
of Dunure that none were brought him. 

The people at the public-house did not 
seem well pleased to see me, and though I 
would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, 
sent me ''ben the hoose" into the guest- 
room. This guest-room at Dunure was 
painted in quite aesthetic fashion. There are 
rooms in the same taste not a hundred miles 
from London, where persons of an extreme 
sensibility meet together without embar- 
rassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green 
and black; a grave harmonious piece of col- 
ouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk 
can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the 
most exquisite purist. A cherry-red half 
window-blindkept up an imaginary warmth 
in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on 
the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- 
penny china figure were ranged solemnly 
along the mantel-shelf Even the spittoon 
was an original note, and instead of sawdust 

73 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

contained sea-shells. And as for the hearth- 
rug, it would merit an article to itself, and a 
coloured diagram to help the text. It was 
patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor: 
no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chi- 
nese silk, shaken together in the kaleido- 
scope of some tasteful housewife's fancy; 
but a work of art in its own way, and plainly 
a labour of love. The patches came exclu- 
sively from people's raiment. There was no 
colour more brilliant than a heather mixture ; 
''My Johnnie's grey breeks," well polished 
over the oar on the boat's thwart, entered 
largely into its composition. And the spoils 
of an old black cloth coat, that had been 
many a Sunday to church, added something 
(save the mark !) of preciousness to the mate- 
rial. 

While I was at luncheon four carters came 
in — long-limbed, muscular Ayrshire Scots, 
with lean, intelligent faces. Four quarts of 
stout were ordered; they kept filling the 
tumbler with the other hand as they drank; 
and in less time than it takes me to write 
these words the four quarts were finished — 
another round was proposed, discussed, and 
74 



A WINTERS WALK 

negatived — and they were creaking out of 
tlie village with their carts. 

The ruins drew you towards them. You 
never saw any place more desolate from a dis- 
tance, nor one that less belied its promise 
near at hand. Some crows and gulls flew 
away croaking as I scrambled in. The snow 
had drifted into the vaults. The clachan dab- 
bled with snow, the white hills, the black 
sky, the sea marked in the coves with faint 
circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it 
looked from a loophole in Dunure, was cold, 
wretched, and out-at-elbows. If you had 
been a wicked baron and compelled to stay 
there all the afternoon, you would have had 
a rare fit of remorse. How you would have 
heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers ! 
I think it would have come to homicide be- 
fore the evening — if it were only for the 
pleasure of seeing something red! And the 
masters of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were 
remarkable of old for inhumanity. One of 
these vaults where the snow had drifted was 
that "black voute " where ' ' Mr. Alane Stew- 
art, Commendatour of Crossraguel," en- 
dured his fiery trials. On the ist and 7th of 

75 



ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 

September, 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!), 
Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his 
baker, his cook, his pantryman, and another 
servant, boundthe poorCommendator **be- 
twix an iron chimlay and afire," and there 
cruelly roasted him until he signed away his 
abbacy. It is one of the ugliest stories of an 
ugly period, but not, somehow, without 
such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes it 
hard to sympathise quite seriously with the 
vidim. And it is consoling to remember that 
he got away at last, and kept his abbacy, 
and, over and above, had a pension from the 
Earl until he died. 

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of 
somewhat less unkindly aspedl, opened out. 
Colzean plantations lay all along the steep 
shore, and there was a wooded hill towards 
the centre, where the trees made a sort of 
shadowy etching over the snow. The road 
went down and up, and past a blacksmith's 
cottage that made fine music in the valley. 
Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me 
in a cart. They were all drunk, and asked me 
jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure. I 
told them it was; and my answer was re- 
76 



A WINTERS WALK 

ceived with unfeigned merriment. One gen- 
tleman was so much tickled he nearly fell 
out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved by 
a companion, who either had not so fine a 
sense of humour or had drunken less. 

"The toune of Mayboll," says the inimi- 
table Abercrummie,^ ''stands upon an as- 
cending ground from east to west, and lyes 
open to the south. It hath one principall 
street, with houses upon both sides, built of 
freestone; and it is beautifyed with the sit- 
uation of two castles, one at each end of this 
street. That on the east belongs to the Erie 
of Cassilis. On the west end is a castle, 
which belonged sometime to the laird of 
Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is 
adorned with a pyremide [conical roof], and 
a row of ballesters round it raised from the 
top of the staircase, into which they have 
mounted a fyne clock. There be four lanes 
which pass from the principall street ; one is 
called the Black Vennel, which is steep, de- 
clining to the south-west, and leads to a 
lower street, which is far larger than the 

' William Abercrombie. See Fasti Ecclesice Scoticance, 
under "Maybole" (Partiii.)- 

77 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

high chiefe street, and it runs from the Kirk- 
land to the Well Trees, in which there have 
been many pretty buildings, belonging to 
the severall gentry of the countrey, who 
were wont to resort thither in winter, and 
divert themselves in converse together at 
their owne houses. It was once the principall 
street of the town ; but many of these houses 
of the gentry having been decayed and 
ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beau- 
tie. Just opposite to this vennel, there is an- 
other that leads north-west, from the chiefe 
street to the green, which is a pleasant plott 
of ground, enclosed round with an earthen 
wall, wherein they were wont to play foot- 
ball, but now at the Go wff and byasse-bo wis. 
The houses of this towne, on both sides of 
the street, have their several gardens belong- 
ing to them ; and in the lower street there be 
some pretty orchards, that yield store of 
good fruit." As Patterson says, this descrip- 
tion is near enough even to-day, and is 
mighty nicely written to boot. I am bound 
to add, of my own experience, that Maybole 
is tumbledown and dreary. Prosperous 
enough in reality, it has an air of decay ; and 
78 



A WINTERS WALK 

though the population has increased, a roof- 
less house every here and there seems to 
protest the contrary. The women are more 
than well-favoured, and the men fine tall 
fellows; but they look slipshod and dissi- 
pated. As they slouched at street corners, or 
stood about gossiping in the snow, it seemed 
they would have been more at home in the 
slums of a large city than here in a country 
place betwixt a village and a town. I heard a 
great deal about drinking, and a great deal 
about religious revivals : two things in which 
the Scottish charafter is emphatic and most 
unlovely. In particular, I heard of clergymen 
who were employing their time in explain- 
ing to a delighted audience the physics of 
the Second Coming. It is not very likely any 
of us will be asked to help. If we were, it is 
likely we should receive instrudions for the 
occasion, and that on more reliable authority. 
And so I can only figure to myself a congre- 
gation truly curious in such flights of theo- 
logical fancy, as one of veteran and accom- 
plished saints, who have fought the good 
fight to an end and outlived all worldly pas- 
sion, and are to be regarded rather as a part 

79 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

of the Church Triumphant than the poor, 
imperfed company on earth. And yet I saw 
some young fellows about the smoking- 
room who seemed, in the eyes of one who 
cannot count himself strait-laced, in need of 
some more practical sort of teaching. They 
seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do 
so speedily. It was not much more than a 
week after the New Year; and to hear them 
return on their past bouts with a gusto un- 
speakable was not altogether pleasing. Here 
is one snatch of talk, for the accuracy of 
which I can vouch — 

' ' Ye had a spree here last Tuesday ? " 

''We had that!" 

"I wasna able to be oot o' my bed. Man, 
I was awful bad on Wednesday." 

"Ay, ye were gey bad." 

And you should have seen the bright eyes, 
and heard the sensual accents ! They recalled 
their doings with devout gusto and a sort of 
rational pride. Schoolboys, after their first 
drunkenness, are not more boastful; a cock 
does not plume himself with a more un- 
mingled satisfadion as he paces forth among 
his harem; and yet these were grown men, 
80 



A WINTERS WALK 

and by no means short of wit. It was hard to 
suppose they were very eager about the 
Second Coming: it seemed as if some ele- 
mentary notions of temperance for the men 
and seemliness for the women would have 
gone nearer the mark. And yet, as it seemed 
to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, 
Maybole is also typical of much that is best. 
Some of the fadories, which have taken the 
place of weaving in the town's economy, 
were originally founded and are still pos- 
sessed by self-made men of the sterling, 
stout old breed — fellows who made some 
little bit of an invention, borrowed some 
little pocketful of capital, and then, step by 
step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought 
their way upwards to an assured position. 
Abercrummie has told you enough of the 
Tolbooth; but, as a bit of spelling, this in- 
scription on the Tolbooth bell seems too de- 
licious to withhold : * ' This bell is founded at 
Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman, the 6th 
November, 1696, Bi appointment of the her- 
itors of the parish of Maiyboll." The Castle 
deserves more notice. It is a large and 
shapely tower, plain from the ground up- 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

wards, but with a zone of ornamentation 
running about the top. In a general way this 
adornment is perched on the very summit of 
the chimney-stacks; but there is one corner 
more elaborate than the rest. A very heavy 
string-course runs round the upper story, 
and just above this, facing up the street, the 
tower carries a small oriel window, fluted 
and corbelled and carved about with stone 
heads. It is so ornate it has somewhat the air 
of a shrine. And it was, indeed, the casket of 
a very precious jewel, for in the room to 
which it gives light lay, for long years, the 
heroine of the sweet old ballad of ''Johnnie 
Faa" — she who, at the call of the gipsies' 
songs, ''came tripping down the stair, and 
all her maids before her." Some people say 
the ballad has no basis in fad, and have 
written, 1 believe, unanswerable papers to 
the proof. But in the face of all that, the very 
look of that high oriel window convinces the 
imagination, and we enter into all the sor- 
rows of the imprisoned dame. We conceive 
the burthen of the long, lack-lustre days, 
when she leaned her sick head against the 
mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in 



A WINTERS WALK 

Maybole High Street, and the children at 
phiy, and ruffling gallants riding by from 
hunt or foray. We conceive the passion of 
odd moments, when the wind threw up to 
her some snatch of song, and her heart grew 
hot within her, and her eyes overflowed at 
the memory of the past. And even if the tale 
be not true of this or that lady, or this or that 
old tower, it is true in the essence of all men 
and women: for all of us, sometime or other, 
hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the 
glamour cast. Some resist and sit resolutely 
by the fire. Most go and are brought back 
again, like Lady Cassilis. A few, of the tribe 
of Waring, go and are seen no more; only 
now and again, at springtime, when the gip- 
sies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, 
we can catch their voices in the glee. 

By night it was clearer, and Maybole more 
visible than during the day. Clouds coursed 
over the sky in great masses; the full moon 
battled the other way, and lit up the snow 
with gleams of flying silver; the town came 
down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, 
bestridden by smooth white roofs, and span- 
gled here and there with lighted windows. 

83 



ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 

At either end the snow stood high up in the 
darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and 
among the chimneys of the Castle. As the 
moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the 
town between the racing clouds, the white 
roofs leaped into relief over the gables and 
the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over 
the white roofs. In the town itself the lit face 
of the clock peered down the street; an hour 
was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and 
from behind the red curtains of a public-house 
some one trolled out — a compatriot of 
Burns, again ! — " The saut tear blin's my e'e. " 
Next morning there was sun and aflapping 
wind. From the street corners of Maybole I 
could catch breezy glimpses of green fields. 
The road underfoot was wet and heavy — 
part ice, part snow, part water; and any one 
I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 
*'A finethowe" (thaw). My way lay among 
rather bleak hills, and past bleak ponds and 
dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the 
Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald. It 
has little claim to notice, save that Burns 
came there tostudysurveyinginthe summer 
of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the 
84 



A WINTERS WALK 

original of Tarn o' Shanter sleeps his last 
sleep. It is worth noticing, however, that 
this was the first place I thought ' ' Highland- 
looking." Over the hill from Kirkoswald a 
farm-road leads to the coast. As 1 came down 
above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed 
strangely different from the day before. The 
cold fogs were all blown away; and there 
was Ailsa Craig, like a refradion, magnified 
and deformed, of the Bass Rock; and there 
were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran, 
veined and tipped with snow; and behind, 
and fainter, the low, blue land of Cantyre. 
Cottony clouds stood, in a great castle, over 
the top of Arran, and blew out in long 
streamers to the south. The sea was bitten 
all over with white; little ships, tacking up 
and down the Firth, lay over at different 
angles in the wind. On Shanter they were 
ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by 
himself, capered and whinnied as if the 
spring were in him. 

The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies 
along the shore, among sand-hills and by 
wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here 
and there a few cottages stood together be- 

85 



BSSAVS AND CRITICISMS 

side a bridge. They had one odd feature, not 
easy to describe in words : a triangular porch 
projected from above the door, supported at 
the apex by a single upright post; a second- 
ary door was hinged to the post, and could 
be hasped on either cheek of the real en- 
trance; so, whether the wind was north or 
south, the cotter could make himself a tri- 
angular bight of shelter where to set his 
chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is 
one objeftion to this device: for, as the post 
stands in the middle of the fairway, any one 
precipitately issuing from the cottage must 
run his chance of a broken head. So far as I 
am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of 
country about Girvan. And that corner is no- 
ticeable for more reasons: it is certainly 
one of the most charaderistic distrids in 
Scotland. It has this movable porch by way 
of architefture; it has, as we shall see, a sort 
of remnant of provincial costume, and it 
has the handsomest population in the Low- 
lands. . . . 



86 




V 

FOREST NOTES 

1873-6 

ON THE TLAIN 
ERHAPS the reader knows already 
the aspedl of the great levels of the 
Gatinais, where they border with 
the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here and 
there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest 
as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few 
apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The 
quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small 
fields dies out into the distance; the strips 
blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies 
forth open and empty, with no accident save 
perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church 
spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all 
times, in spite of pettiness in the near details, 
the impression becomes more solemn and 
vast towards evening. The sun goes down, 
a swollen orange, as it were into the sea. A 
blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow 

87 



ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 

smoking behind him among the dry clods. 
Another still works with his wife in their lit- 
tle strip. An immense shadow fills the plain ; 
these people stand in it up to their shoulders ; 
and their heads, as they stoop over their 
work and rise again, are relieved from time 
to time against the golden sky. 

These peasant farmers are well off now- 
adays, and not by any means overworked; 
but somehow you always see in them the 
historical representative of the serf of yore, 
and think not so much of present times, 
which may be prosperous enough, as of the 
old days when the peasant was taxed be- 
yond possibility of payment, and lived, in 
Michelet's image, like a hare between two 
furrows. These very people now weeding 
their patch under the broad sunset, that very 
man and his wife, it seems to us, have suf- 
fered all the wrongs of France. It is they 
who have been their country's scapegoat for 
long ages; they who, generation after gen- 
eration, have sowed and not reaped, reaped 
and another has garnered; and who have 
now entered into their reward, and enjoy 
their good things in their turn. For the 



FOREST NOTES 

days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled 
and profited. " Le Seigneur," says the old 
formula, ' ' enferme ses manants comme sous 
porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est 
a lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans I'air, poisson 
dans I'eau, bete au buisson, I'onde qui coule, 
la cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such 
was his old state of sovereignty, a local god 
rather than a mere king. And now you may 
ask yourself where he is, and look round for 
vestiges of my late lord, and in all the coun- 
try-side there is no trace of him but his for- 
lorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long 
avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst 
of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks 
and crowing chanticleers and droning bees, 
the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and 
peaked roofs and turning vanes into the 
wind and sun. There is a glad spring bustle 
in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in 
flower, and the creepers green about the 
broken balustrade; but no spring shall re- 
vive the honour of the place. Old women of 
the people, little children of the people, 
saunter and gambol in the walled court or 
feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough- 

89 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long 
stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits 
for some better hour. Out on the plain, 
where hot sweat trickles into men's eyes,, 
and the spade goes in deep and comes up 
slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a 
movement of joy at his heart when he thinks 
that these spacious chimneys are now cold, 
which have so often blazed and flickered 
upon gay folk at supper, while he and his 
hollow-eyed children watched through the 
night with empty bellies and cold feet. And 
perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the 
forest lying like a coast-line of low hills 
along the sea-hke level of the plain, perhaps 
forest and chateau hold no unsimilar place 
in his afifedions. 

If the chateau was my lord's the forest was 
my lord the king's; neither of them for this 
poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his 
meagre way of life by some petty theft of 
wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he 
found himself face to face with a whole de- 
partment, from the Grand Master of the 
Woods and Waters, who was a high-born 
lord, down to the common sergeant, who 
90 



FOREST NOTES 

was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes 
or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For the 
first offence, by the Salic law, there was a 
fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be 
taken more than once in fault, or circum- 
stances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he 
might be whipped, branded, or hanged. 
There was a hangman over at Melun, and, 1 
doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town 
gate, where Jacques might see his fellows 
dangle against the sky as he went to market. 
And then, if he Hved near to a cover, there 
would be the more hares and rabbits to eat 
out his harvest, and the more hunters to 
trample it down. My lord has a new horn 
from England. He has laid out seven francs 
in decorating it with silver and gold, and 
fitting it with a silken leash to hang about 
his shoulder. The hounds have been on a 
pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, 
or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some 
other holy intercessor who has made a spe- 
cialty of the health of hunting-dogs. In the 
grey dawn the game was turned and the 
branch broken by our best piqueur. A rare 
day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly 

9> 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

flourish, sound the bien-aller with all your 
lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, 
while the quarry and hound and huntsman 
sweep across his field, and a year's sparing 
and labouring is as though it had not been. 
If he can see the ruin with a good enough 
grace, who knows but he may fall in favour 
with my lord; who knows but his son may 
become the last and least among the ser- 
vants at his lordship's kennel — one of the 
two poor varlets who get no wages and 
sleep at night among the hounds ? ' 

For all that, the forest has been of use to 
Jacques, not only warming him with fallen 
wood, but giving him shelter in days of 
sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, 
with all his troopers and trumpets, had been 
beaten from field after field into some ulti- 
mate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English 
prison. In these dark days, when the watch 
on the church steeple saw the smoke of 
burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump 

* " Deux poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gis- 
soient la nuit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's 
Louis et Charles d'Oi'leans, i. 6}, and for my lord's 
English horn, ibid. 96. 

92 



FOREST NOTES 

of spears and fluttering pennons drawing 
nigh across the plain, these good folk gat 
them up, with all their household gods, in- 
to the wood, whence, from some high spur, 
their timid scouts might overlook the com- 
ing and going of the marauders, and see the 
harvest ridden down, and church and cot- 
tage go up to heaven all night in flame. It 
was but an unhomely refuge that the woods 
afforded, where they must abide all change 
of weather and keep house with wolves and 
vipers. Often there was none left alive, when 
they returned, to show the old divisions of 
field from field. And yet, as times went, 
when the wolves entered at night into de- 
populated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was 
passing by with a company of demons like 
himself, even in these caves and thickets 
there were glad hearts and grateful prayers. 
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of 
the ages, the forest may have served the 
peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, 
and noble by old association. These woods 
have rung to the horns of all the kings of 
France, from Philip Augustus downwards. 
They have seen Saint Louis exercise the 

9^ 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

dogs he brought with him from Egypt; 
Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand 
horses in his train; and Peter of Russia fol- 
lowing his first stag. And so they are still 
haunted for the imagination by royal hunts 
and progresses, and peopled with the faces 
of memorable men of yore. And this dis- 
tinction is not only in virtue of the pastime 
of dead monarchs. Great events, great rev- 
olutions, great cycles in the affairs of men, 
have here left their note, here taken shape 
in some significant and dramatic situation. 
It was hence that Guise and his leaguers led 
Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, 
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs 
about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside a 
woodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba 
not so long after, he kissed the eagle of the 
Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate 
farewell to his soldiers. And here, after 
Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign to the 
new power, one of his faithful regiments 
burned that memorial of so much toil and 
glory on the Grand Master's table, and drank 
its dust in brandy, as a devout priest con- 
sumes the remnants of the Host. 

94 



FOREST NOTES 

IN THE SEASON 
Close into the edge of the forest, so close 
that the trees of the homage stand pleasantly 
about the last houses, sits a certain small and 
very quiet village. There is but one street, 
and that, not long ago, was a green lane, 
where the cattle browsed between the door- 
steps. As you go up this street, drawing ever 
nearer the beginning of the wood, you will 
arrive at last before an inn where artists 
lodge. To the door (for I imagine it to be six 
o'clock on some fine summer's even), half a 
dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have 
brought out chairs, and now sit sunning 
themselves, and waiting the omnibus from 
Melun. If you go on into the court you will 
fmd as many more, somein the billiard-room 
over absinthe and a match of corks, some 
without over a last cigar and a vermouth. 
The doves coo and flutter from the dovecote ; 
Hortense is drawing water from the well; 
and as all the rooms open into the court, you 
can see the white-capped cook over the fur- 
nace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, 
who has stored his canvases and washed his 

95 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, 
tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger. 
'"Edmond, encore tin vermouth/' cries a man 
in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic 
afterthought, "tm double, s'ilvoiis plait/' 
"Where are you working?" asks one in 
pure white linen from top to toe. "At the 
Carrefour de I'Epine," returns the other in 
corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way). 
"I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of 
white. Where were you .? " "I was n't work- 
ing, I was looking for motives." Here is an 
outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clus- 
tering together about some new-comer with 
outstretched hands; perhaps the "corre- 
spondence" has come in and brought So- 
and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So- 
and-so who has walked over from Chailly to 
dinner. 

''A table, (Messieurs!" cries M. Siron, 
bearing through the court the first tureen of 
soup. And immediately the company begins 
to settle down about the long tables in the 
dining-room, framed all round with sketches 
of all degrees of merit and demerit. There's 
the big pidure of the huntsman winding a 
96 



FOREST NOTES 

horn with a dead boar between his legs, and 
his legs — well, his legs in stockings. And 
here is the little pidure of a raw mutton- 
chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole 
last summer with no worse a missile than a 
plum from the dessert. And under all these 
works of art so much eating goes forward, 
so much drinking, so much jabbering in 
French and English, that it would do your 
heart good merely to peep and listen at the 
door. One man is telling how they all went 
last year to the fete at Fleury, and another 
how well So-and-so would sing of an even- 
ing; and here are a third and fourth making 
plans for the whole future of their lives ; and 
there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and mak- 
ing faces on his clenched fist, surely of all 
arts the most difficult and admirable ! A sixth 
has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and re- 
signs himself to digestion. A seventh has 
just dropped in, and calls for soup. Number 
eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is 
once more trampling the poor piano under 
powerful and uncertain fingers. 

Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke 
and chat. Perhaps we go along to visit our 

97 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

friends at the other end of the village, where 
there is always a good welcome and a good 
talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters and 
white wine to close the evening. Or a dance 
is organised in the dining-room, and the 
piano exhibits all its paces under manful 
jockeying, to the light of the three or four 
candles and a lamp or two, while the waltz- 
ers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, 
and sober men, who are not given to such 
light pleasures, get up on the table or the 
sideboard, and sit there looking on approv- 
ingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or 
sometimes — suppose my lady moon looks 
forth, and the court from out the half-lit 
dining-room seems nearly as bright as by 
day, and the light picks out the window- 
panes, and makes a clear shadow under 
every vine-leaf on the wall — sometimes a 
picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready, 
and a good procession formed in front of the 
hotel. The two trumpeters in honour go be- 
fore; and as we file down the long alley, and 
up through devious footpaths among rocks 
and pine-trees, with every here and there a 
dark passage of shadow, and every here 
98 



FOREST NOTES 

and there a spacious outlook over moonlit 
woods, these two precede us and sound 
many a jolly flourish as they walk. We 
gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, 
and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows 
of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely 
beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged 
about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the 
punch is burnt and sent round in scalding 
thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may 
pass with song and jest. And then we go 
home in the moonlight morning, straggHng 
a good deal among the birch tufts and the 
boulders, but ever called together again, as 
one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps 
some one of the party will not heed the 
summons, but chooses out some by-way of 
his own. As he follows the winding sandy 
road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter 
and fainter in the distance, and die finally 
out, and still walks on in the strange cool- 
ness and silence and between the crisp 
lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, 
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour 
from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find 
himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and 

99 

LofC. 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

perilous shores, no passing knoll over the 
busy market-place, can speak with a more 
heavy and disconsolate tongue to human 
ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly 
reverberations in his mind. And as he stands 
rooted, it has grown once more so utterly 
silent that it seems to him he might hear 
the church bells ring the hour out all the 
world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, 
and away in outlandish cities, and in the 
village on the river, where his childhood 
passed between the sun and flowers. 

IDLE HOURS 

The woods by night, in all their uncanny 
effe6t, are not rightly to be understood until 
you can compare them with the woods by 
day. The stillness of the medium, the floor 
of glittering sand, these trees that go stream- 
ing up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver 
in the moving winds like the weeds in sub- 
marine currents, all these set the mind work- 
ing on the thought of what you may have 
seen off a foreland or over the side of a boat, 
and make you feel like a diver, down in the 
quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, 

lOO 



FOREST NOTES 

transitory surface of the sea. And yet in it- 
self, as I say, the strangeness of these noc- 
turnal solitudes is not to be felt fully without 
the sense of contrast. You must have risen 
in the morning and seen the woods as they 
are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's 
light; you must have felt the odour of in- 
numerable trees at even, the unsparing heat 
along the forest roads, and the coolness of 
the groves. 

And on the first morning you will doubt- 
less rise betimes. If you have not been wak- 
ened before by the visit of some adventurous 
pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the 
sun can reach your window — for there are 
no blinds or shutters to keep him out — and 
the room, with its bare wood floor and bare 
whitewashed walls, shines all round you in 
a sort of glory of reflefted lights. You may 
doze a while longer by snatches, or lie awake 
to study the charcoal men and dogs and 
horses with which former occupants have 
defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily pro- 
file; local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, may- 
be, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. 
Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the 

101 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders 
easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound 
into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his 
** motive." And artist after artist, as he goes 
out of the village, carries with him a little fol- 
lowing of dogs. For the dogs, who belong 
only nominally to any special master, hang 
about the gate of the forest all day long, and 
whenever any one goes by who hits their 
fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with 
him to play an hour or two at hunting. They 
would like to be under the trees all day. But 
they cannot go alone. They require a pre- 
text. And so they take the passing artist as 
an excuse to go into the woods, as they 
might take a walking-stick as an excuse to 
bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and 
bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound 
and with a bulldog's head, this company of 
mongrels will trot by your side all day and 
come home with you at night, still showing 
white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their 
good humour is not to be exhausted. You 
may pelt them with stones if you please, and 
all they will do is to give you a wider berth. 
If once they come out with you, to you they 
102 



FOREST NOTES 

will remain faithful, and with you return ; al- 
though if you meet them next morning in 
the street, it is as like as not they will cut 
you with a countenance of brass. 

The forest — a strange thing for an Eng- 
lishman — is very destitute of birds. This is 
no country where every patch of wood 
among the meadows gives up an incense of 
song, and every valley wandered through 
by a streamlet rings and reverberates from 
side to side with a profusion of clear notes. 
And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted 
on its own account only. For the inseds 
prosper in their absence, and become as one 
of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the 
hot sand ; mosquitos drone their nasaldrone ; 
wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of 
the forest, you see a myriad transparent 
creatures coming and going in the shaft of 
light; and even between-whiles, even where 
there is no incursion of sun-rays into the 
dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious 
of a continual drift of inseds, an ebb and 
flow of infinitesimal living things between 
the trees. Nor are inseds the only evil crea- 
tures that haunt the forest. For you may 

103 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

plump into a cave among the rocks, and find 
yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see 
a crooked viper slither across the road. 

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the 
bay between two spreading beech-roots 
with a book on your lap, and be awakened 
all of a sudden by a friend: "I say, just 
keep where you are, will you? You make 
the jolliest motive." And you reply: **WelI, 
I don't mind, if I may smoke." And there- 
after the hours go idly by. Your friend at 
the easel labours doggedly a little way off, 
in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet 
farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, 
you see another painter, encamped in the 
shadow of another tree, and up to his waist 
in the fern. You cannot watch your own 
effigy growing out of the white trunk, and 
the trunk beginning to stand forth from the 
rest of the wood, and the whole pidure get- 
ting dappled over with the flecks of sun that 
slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a 
wind goes by and sets the trees a-talking, 
flicker hither and thither like butterflies of 
light. But you know it is going forward; 
and, out of emulation with the painter, get 
104 



FOREST NOTES 

ready your own palette, and lay out the col- 
our for a woodland scene in words. 

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with 
fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills, 
and scattered over with rocks and junipers. 
All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. 
Everything stands out as though it were cut 
in cardboard, every colour is strained into 
its highest' key. The boulders are some of 
them upright and dead like monolithic cas- 
tles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. 
The junipers — -looking, in their soiled and 
ragged mourning, like some funeral proces- 
sion that has gone seeking the place of sep- 
ulchre three hundred years and more in 
wind and rain — are daubed in forcibly 
against the glowing ferns and heather. Every 
tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with 
pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry fig- 
ure they make out there in the sun, like mis- 
begotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched 
in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up 
with such a discharge of violent sunlight, 
as a man might live fifty years in England 
and not see. 

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic 
tremulous air, of how the poet loved his 
mistress long ago, and pressed on her the 
flight of time, and told her how white and 
quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how 
the boat dipped and pitched as the shades 
embarked for the passionless land. Yet a 
little while, sang the poet, and there shall 
be no more love; only to sit and remember 
loves that might have been. There is a fall- 
ing flourish in the air that remains in the 
memory and comes back in incongruous 
places, on the seat of hansoms or in the 
warm bed at night, with something of a 
forest savour. 

" You can get up now," says the painter; 
** I'm at the background." 

And so up you get, stretching yourself, 
and go your way into the wood, the daylight 
becoming richer and more golden, and the 
shadows stretching farther into the open. A 
cool air comes along the highways, and the 
scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad 
their ozone. Out of unknown thickets comes 
forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the 
woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, 
1 06 



FOREST NOTES 

but as though court ladies, who had known 
these paths in ages long gone by, still walked 
in the summer evenings, and shed from their 
brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon 
the woodland winds. One side of the long 
avenues is still kindled with the sun, the 
other is plunged in transparent shadow. 
Over the trees the west begins to burn like a 
furnace; and the painters gather up their 
chattels, and go down, by avenue or foot- 
path, to the plain. 

<^ PLEASURE PARTY 

As this excursion is a matter of some 
length, and, moreover, we go in force, we 
have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony- 
cart, and ordered a large wagonette from Le- 
josne's. It has been waiting for near an hour, 
while one went to pack a knapsack, and 
t'other hurried over his toilette and coffee; 
but now it is filled from end to end with 
merry folk in summer attire, the coachman 
cracks his whip, and amid much applause 
from round the inn door off we rattle at a 
spanking trot. The way lies through the for- 
est, up hill and down dale, and by beech and 

107 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

pine wood, in the cheerful morning sun- 
shine. The English get down at all the as- 
cents and walk on ahead for exercise; the 
French are mightily entertained at this, and 
keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we 
carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter 
and light speech, and some one will be al- 
ways breaking out into a bar or two of opera 
bouffe. Before we get to the Route Ronde 
here comes Desprez, the colourman from 
Fontainebleau, trudging across on his week- 
ly peddle with a case of merchandise; and it 
is "Desprez, leave me some malachite 
green"; "Desprez, leave me so much can- 
vas " ; " Desprez, leave me this, or leave me 
that " ; M. Desprez standing the while in the 
sunlight with grave face and many saluta- 
tions. The next interruption is more impor- 
tant. For some time back we have had the 
sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a 
little past Franchard, we find a mounted 
trooper holding a led horse, who brings the 
wagonette to a stand. The artillery is pradis- 
ing in the Quadrilateral, it appears; passage 
along the Route Ronde formally interdided 
for the moment. There is nothing for it but 
108 



FOREST NOTES 

to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, and 
get down to make fun with the notorious 
Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred 
dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of 
Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. 
And meanwhile the Doctor, with sun um- 
brella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, 
is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of 
us know) bribing the too facile sentry. His 
speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner 
dignified and insinuating. It is not for noth- 
ing that the Dodor has voyaged all the world 
over, and speaks all languages from French 
to Patagonian. He has not come home from 
perilous journeys to be thwarted by a cor- 
poral of horse. And so we soon see the sol- 
dier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate 
a relenting heart. ''En voiture, Messieurs, 
Mesdames," sings the Doftor; and on we go 
again at a good round pace, for black care fol- 
lows hard after us, and discretion prevails not 
a little over valour in some timorous spirits of 
the party. At any moment we may meet the 
sergeant, who will send us back. At any mo- 
ment we may encounter a flyingshell, which 
will send us somewhere farther off than Grez. 

109 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

Grez — for that is our destination — has 
been highly recommended for its beauty. 
"' Ily a de I'eaii/' people have said, with an 
emphasis, as if that settled the question, 
which, for a French mind, I am rather led 
to think it does. And Grez, when we get 
there, is indeed a place worthy of some 
praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of 
houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in 
ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn gar- 
den descends in terraces to the river; stable- 
yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, 
fringed with rushes and embellished with a 
green arbour. On the opposite bank there is 
a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly 
with willows and poplars. And between the 
two lies the river, clear and deep, and full of 
reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster 
about the starlings of the long low bridge, 
and stand half-way up upon the piers in 
green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar 
with long antennae, and chequer the slimy 
bottom with the shadow of their leaves. And 
the river wanders hither and thither among 
the islets, and is smothered and broken up 
by the reeds, like an old building in the 

1 lO 



FOREST NOTES 

lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You 
may watch the box where the good man of 
the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one 
oily ripple following another over the top of 
the yellow deal. And you can hear a splash- 
ing and a prattle of voices from the shed 
under the old kirk, where the village women 
wash and wash all day among the fish and 
water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there 
should be specially cool and sweet. 

We have come here for the river. And no 
sooner have we all bathed than we board 
the two shallops and push off gaily, and go 
gliding under the trees and gathering a great 
treasure of water-lilies. Some one sings; 
some trail their hands in the cool water; 
some lean over the gunwale to see the image 
of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow 
of the boat, with the balanced oars and their 
own head protruded, glide smoothly over 
the yellow floor of the stream. At last, the 
day declining — all silent and happy, and up 
to the knees in the wet lilies — we punt 
slowly back again to the landing-place be- 
side the bridge. There is a wish for solitude 
on all. One hides himself in the arbour with 

III 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

a cigarette; another goes a walk in the 
country with Cocardon ; a third inspe6ls the 
church. And it is not till dinner is on the 
table, and the inn's best wine goes round 
from glass to glass, that we begin to throw 
off the restraint and fuse once more into a 
jolly fellowship. 

Half the party are to return to-night with 
the wagonette; and some of the others, loath 
to break up good company, will go with 
them a bit of the way and drink a stirrup- 
cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the wagonette, 
and not so merry as it might have been. The 
coachman loses the road. So-and-so tries to 
light fireworks with the most indifferent 
success. Some sing, but the rest are too 
weary to applaud; and it seems as if the 
festival were fairly at an end — 

** Nous avons fait la noce, 
Rentrons a nos foyers! " 

And such is the burthen, even after we have 
come to Marlotte and taken our places in the 
court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch 
on the long table out in the open air, where 
the guests dine in summer weather. The 
candles flare in the night wind, and the faces 

I 12 



FOREST NOTES 

round the punch are lit up, with shifting 
emphasis, against a background of complete 
and solid darkness. It is all piduresque 
enough; but the fa6t is, we are aweary. We 
yawn; we are out of the vein; we have 
made the wedding, as the song says, and 
now, for pleasure's sake, let's make an end 
on't. When here comes striding into the 
court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and 
splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the great, 
famous, and redoubtable Blank; and in a 
moment the fire kindles again, and the night 
is witness of our laughter as he imitates 
Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, pidure- 
dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and 
thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain 
of mind and voice, that would rather sug- 
gest a nervous crisis than a desire to please. 
We are as merry as ever when the trap sets 
forth again, and say farewell noisily to all 
the good folk going farther. Then, as we are 
far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit 
Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour 
or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with 
furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit 
up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a 

113 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

wood fire in a mediaeval chimney. And then 
we plod back through the darkness to the 
inn beside the river. 

How quick bright things come to confu- 
sion! When we arise next morning, the 
grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang 
limp, and the face of the stream is spoiled 
with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies 
encumber the garden walk, or begin, dis- 
mally enough, their voyage towards the 
Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies 
upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the 
colour is washed out of the green and golden 
landscape of last night, as though an envi- 
ous man had taken a water-colour sketch 
and blotted it together with a sponge. We 
go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the 
roads about Grez have a trick of their own. 
They go on for a while among clumps of 
willows and patches of vine, and then, sud- 
denly and without any warning, cease and 
determine in some miry hollow or upon 
some bald know; and you have a short 
period of hope, then right-about face, and 
back the way you came! So we draw about 
the kitchen fire and play a round game of 
114 



FOREST NOTES 

cards for ha'pence, or go to the billiard-room 
for a match at corks; and by one consent 
a messenger is sent over for the wagonette 
— Grez shall be left to-morrow. 

To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the 
party agree to walk back for exercise, and 
let their knapsacks follow by the trap. 1 
need hardly say they are neither of them 
French; for, of all English phrases, the 
phrase "for exercise" is the least compre- 
hensible across the Straits of Dover. All 
goes well for a while with the pedestrians. 
The wet woods are full of scents in the 
noontide. At a certain cross, where there is 
a guardhouse, they make a halt, for the for- 
ester's wife is the daughter of their good 
host at Barbizon. And so there they are hos- 
pitably received by the comely woman, 
with one child in her arms and another prat- 
tling and tottering at her gown, and drink 
some syrup of quince in the back parlour, 
with a map of the forest on the wall, and 
some prints of love-affairs and the great 
Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the 
Quadrilateral, and hear once more the re- 
port of the big guns, they take a by-road to 

H5 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

avoid the sentries, and go on a while some- 
what vaguely, with the sound of the cannon 
in their ears and the rain beginning to fall. 
The ways grow wider and sandier; here and 
there there are real sand-hills, as though by 
the sea-shore; the fir-wood is open and 
grows in clumps upon the hillocks, and the 
race of sign-posts is no more. One begins to 
look at the other doubtfully. " I am sure we 
should keep more to the right, " says one ; and 
the other is just as certain they should hold 
to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens 
open, and the rain falls ''sheer and strong 
and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a mo- 
ment they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. 
They cannot see out of their eyes for the drift, 
and the water churns and gurgles in their 
boots. They leave the track and try across 
country with a gambler's desperation, for it 
seems as if it were impossible to make the 
situation worse; and, for the next hour, go 
scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod 
along paths that are now no more than rivu- 
lets, and across waste clearings where the 
scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all 
too plainly of the cannon in the distance. 
ii6 



FOREST NOTES 

And meantime the cannon grumble out re- 
sponses to the grumbling thunder. There is 
such a mixture of melodrama and sheer dis- 
comfort about all this, it is at once so grey 
and so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to 
read and write about by the chimney-corner 
than to suffer in the person. At last they 
chance on the right path, and make Fran- 
chard in the early evening, the sorriest pair 
of wanderers that ever welcomed English 
ale. Thence, by the Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes- 
Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean 
hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner. 

THE WOODS IN SPRING 
I think you will like the forest best in the 
sharp early springtime, when it is just begin- 
ning to reawaken, and innumerable violets 
peep from among the fallen leaves ; when two 
or three people at most sit down to dinner, 
and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug 
about your knees, for the nights are chill, and 
the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There 
is less to distract the attention,for one thing, 
and the forest is more itself. It is not be- 

dotted with artists' sunshades as with un- 

117 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

known mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the 
remains of English picnics. The hunting still 
goes on, and at any moment your heart may 
be brought into your mouth as you hear far- 
away horns; or you may be told by an agi- 
tated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up 
the avenue, not ten minutes since, '"a fond 
de train, monsieur, etavec doniepiqueiirs." 
If you go up to some coign of vantage in 
the system of low hills that permeates the 
forest, you will see many different tra6ls of 
country, each of its own cold and melan- 
choly neutral tint, and all mixed together 
and mingled the one into the other at the 
seams. You will see trads of leafless beeches 
of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a 
little ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine 
of a solemn green; and, dotted among the 
pines, or standing by themselves in rocky 
clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks 
of birches, spreading out into snow-white 
branches yet more delicate, and crowned 
and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. 
And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled 
boulders, with bright sand-breaks between 
them, and wavering sandy roads among the 
ii8 



FOREST NOTES 

bracken and brown heather. It is all rather 
cold and unhomely. It has not the perfed 
beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the 
wood in the later year, when it is no more 
than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, 
tremulous with inseds, intersected here and 
there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heath- 
er. The loveliness of the woods in March is 
not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type. It 
is made sharp with a grain of salt, with a 
touch of ugliness. It has a sting like the sting 
of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as 
men acquire a taste for olives. And the won- 
derful clear, pure air wells into your lungs 
the while by voluptuous inhalations, and 
makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart 
tinkling to a new tune — or, rather, to an old 
tune; for you remember in your boyhood 
something akin to this spirit of adventure, 
this thirst for exploration, that now takes 
you masterfully by the hand, plunges you 
into many a deep grove, and drags you over 
many a stony crest. It is as if the whole wood 
were full of friendly voices calling you farther 
in, and you turn from one side to another, 
like Buridan's donkey, in a maze of pleasure. 

119 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

Comely beeches send up their white, 
straight, clustered branches, barred with 
green moss, like so many fingers from a 
half-clenched hand. Mighty oaks stand to 
the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; 
thence the tall shaft chmbs upwards, and the 
great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out 
into the golden evening sky, where the rooks 
are flying and caUing. On the sward of the 
Boisd'Hyverthefirs stand well asunder with 
outspread arms, like fencers saluting; and 
the air smells of resin all around, and the 
sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest 
of all, and in appearance oldest of all, are 
the dim and wizard upland distrids of young 
wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, 
and strewn with fir-apples and flakes of fall- 
en bark. Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, 
guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white 
with years and the rigours of the changeful 
seasons. Brown and yellow butterflies are 
sown and carried away again by the light 
air — like thistledown. The loneliness of 
these coverts is so excessive, that there are 
moments when pleasure draws to the verge 
of fear. You listen and listen for some noise 
1 20 



FOREST NOTES 

to break the silence, till you grow half mes- 
merised by the intensity of the strain; your 
sense of your own identity is troubled ; your 
brain reels, like that of some gymnosophist 
poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; 
and should you see your own outspread 
feet, you see them, not as anything of yours, 
but as a feature of the scene around you. 

Still the forest is always, but the stillness 
is not always unbroken. You can hear the 
wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops ; 
sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; 
sometimes with a long steady rush, like the 
breaking of waves. And sometimes, close at 
hand, the branches move, a moan goes 
through the thicket, and the wood thrills to 
its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage 
on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a 
dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle 
underfoot, or you may time your steps to 
the steady recurrent strokes of the wood- 
man's axe. From time to time, over the low 
grounds, a flight of rooks goes by; and from 
time to time the cooing of wild doves falls 
upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near 
at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of 

121 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

the woods, thin and far away, as fits these 
solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the 
hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; 
scared deer flit past you through the fringes 
of the wood; then a man or two running, 
in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on 
a bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of 
the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or 
perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are 
blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash 
through the clearings, and the solid noise of 
horses galloping passes below you, where 
you sit perched among the rocks and heather. 
The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, 
and in all neighbouring villages, there is a 
vague excitement and a vague hope; for 
who knows whither the chase may lead .? 
and even to have seen a single piqueur, or 
spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man 
of consequence for the night. 

Besides men who shoot and men who 
ride with the hounds, there are few people 
in the forest, in the early spring, save wood- 
cutters plying their axes steadily, and old 
women and children gathering wood for the 
fire. You may meet such a party coming 

I 22 



FOREST NOTES 

home in the twilight: the old woman laden 
with a fagot of chips, and the little ones 
hauling a long branch behind them in her 
wake. That is the worst of what there is to 
encounter; and if I tell you of what once 
happened to a friend of mine, it is by no 
means to tantalise you with false hopes; for 
the adventure was unique. It was on a very 
cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey 
sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this 
friend (who shall here be nameless) heard 
the notes of a key-bugle played with much 
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire 
spread out along the green pine-tops, in a 
remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of 
naked boulders. He drew near warily, and 
beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in 
an open. The old father knitted a sock, the 
mother sat staring at the fire. The eldest 
son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, 
was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. 
Two or three daughters lay in the neigh- 
bourhood picking violets. And the whole 
party as grave and silent as the woods 
around them ! My friend watched for a long 
time, he says; but all held their peace; not 

123 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept 
choosing out single notes upon the bugle, 
and the father knitted away at his work and 
made strange movements the while with 
his flexible eyebrows. They took no notice 
whatever of my friend's presence, which 
was disquieting in itself, and increased the 
resemblance of the whole party to mechani- 
cal waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax 
figure might have played the bugle with 
more spirit than that strange dragoon. And 
as this hypothesis of his became more cer- 
tain, the awful insolubility of why they 
should be left out there in the woods with 
nobody to wind them up again when they 
ran down, and a growing disquietude as to 
what might happen next, became too much 
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly 
took to his heels. It might have been a sing- 
ing in his ears, but he fancies he was fol- 
lowed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laugh- 
ter. Nothing has ever transpired to clear up 
the mystery ; it may be they were automata ; 
or it may be (and this is the theory to which 
I lean myself) that this is all another chap- 
ter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the up- 
124 



FOREST NOTES 

right old man with the eyebrows was no 
other than Father Jove, and the young dra- 
goon with the taste for music either Apollo 

or Mars. 

MORALITY 

Strange indeed is the attradion of the for- 
est for the minds of men. Not one or two 
only, but a great chorus of grateful voices 
have arisen to spread abroad its fame. Half 
the famous writers of modern France have 
had their word to say about Fontainebleau. 
Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George 
Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the 
brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, 
each of these has done something to the eter- 
nal praise and memory of these woods. 
Even at the very worst of times, even when 
the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of 
all Persons of Taste, the forest still preserved 
a certain reputation for beauty. It was in 
1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his 
Historical Description of the Palace, Town, 
and Forest of Fontainebleau. And very droll 
it is to see him, as he tries to set forth his ad- 
miration in terms of what was then permis- 
sible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the 

125 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

Abbe " sont admirees avec surprise des voy- 
ageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace: Ut 
mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus mirari 
libet." The good man is not exa6tly lyrical in 
his praise; and you see how he sets his back 
against Horace as against a trusty oak. Hor- 
ace, at any rate, was classical. For the rest, 
however, the Abbe likes places where many 
alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-Etoile, 
are kept up '*by a special gardener," and 
admires at the Table du Roi the labours of 
the Grand Master of Woods and Waters, the 
Sieur de la Falure, " qui a fait faire ce magni- 
fique endroit." 

But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty 
that the forest makes a claim upon men's 
hearts, as for that subtle something, that 
quality of the air, that emanation from the 
old trees, that so wonderfully changes and 
renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, 
sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand 
Monarchs, time out of mind have come here 
for consolation. Hither perplexed folk have 
retired out of the press of life, as into a deep 
bay-window on some night of masquerade, 
and here found quiet and silence, and rest, 
126 



FOREST NOTES 

the mother of wisdom. It is the great moral 
spa; this forest without a fountain is itself 
the great fountain of Juventius. It is the best 
place in the world to bring an old sorrow 
that has been a long while your friend and 
enemy; and if, like Beranger's, your gaiety 
has run away from home and left open the 
door for sorrow to come in, of all covers in 
Europe, it is here you may exped to find the 
truant hid. With every hour you change. 
The air penetrates through your clothes, 
and nestles to your living body. You love 
exercise and slumber, long fasting and full 
meals. You forget all your scruples and live 
a while in peace and freedom, and for the 
moment only. For here, all is absent that can 
stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as 
you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; 
but you see them framed in the forest, like 
figures on a painted canvas; and for you, 
they are not people in any living and kindly 
sense. You forget the grim contrariety of 
interests. You forget the narrow lane where 
all men jostle together in unchivalrous con- 
tention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, 
that gapes on either hand for the defeated. 

127 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

Life is simple enough, it seems, and the very 
idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy 
out of a last night's dream. 

Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is 
plain and possible. You become enamoured 
of a life of change and movement and the 
open air, where the muscles shall be more 
exercised than the affedions. When you 
have had your will of the forest, you may 
visit the whole round world. You may 
buckle on your knapsack and take the road 
on foot. You may bestride a good nag, and 
ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into 
the enchanted East. You may cross the Black 
Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before 
you, like a map, dotted with old cities, 
walled and spired, that dream all day on 
their own refledions in the Rhine or Dan- 
ube. You may pass the spinal cord of Europe 
and go down from Alpine glaciers to where 
Italy extends her marble moles and glasses 
her marble palaces in the midland sea. You 
may sleep in flying trains or wayside tav- 
erns. You may be awakened at dawn by the 
scream of the express or the small pipe of the 
robin in the hedge. For you the rain should 
128 



FOREST NOTES 

allay the dust of the beaten road; the wind 
dry your clothes upon you as you walked. 
Autumn should hang out russet pears and 
purple grapes along the lane; inn after inn 
proffer you their cups of raw wine ; river by 
river receive your body in the sultry noon. 
Wherever you went warm valleys and high 
trees and pleasant villages should compass 
you about; and light fellowships should take 
you by the arm, and walk with you an hour 
upon your way. You may see from afar off 
what it will come to in the end — the 
weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, con- 
sumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all 
near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an 
Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem 
well — and yet, in the air of the forest, this 
will seem the best — to break all the network 
bound about your feet by birth and old com- 
panionship and loyal love, and bear your 
shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town 
and country, until the hour of the great dis- 
solvent. 

Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. 
For the forest is by itself, and forest life 
owns small kinship with life in the dismal 

129 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated 
that they cannot take the world as it is given 
to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only 
what they see and hear, but what they know 
to be behind, enter into their notion of a 
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across 
the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at 
intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from 
time to time will suffer a sea-change. And 
so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its 
greatness is for much in the effed produced. 
You reckon up the miles that lie between 
you and intrusion. You may walk before you 
all day long, and not fear to touch the bar- 
rier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland 
into the land of gin and steam-hammers. 
And there is an old tale enhances for the 
imagination the grandeur of the woods of 
France, and secures you in the thought of 
your seclusion. When Charles VI. hunted 
in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, 
there was captured an old stag, having a 
collar of bronze about his neck, and these 
words engraved on the collar: ''Caesar mihi 
hoc donavit." It is no wonder if the minds 
of men were moved at this occurrence and 
130 



FOREST NOTES 

they stood aghast to find themselves thus 
touching hands with forgotten ages, and fol- 
lowing an antiquity with hound and horn. 
And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle 
curiosity that you ponder how many cen- 
turies this stag had carried its free antlers 
through the wood, and how many summers 
and winters had shone and snowed on the 
imperial badge. If the extent of solemn 
wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from 
the hunters' hounds and horses, might not 
you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, 
with all the pangs and trepidations of man's 
life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for 
more than the span of human years .^ Here, 
also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest 
glade, sounds the gallop of the pale horse. 
But he does not hunt this cover with all his 
hounds, for the game is thin and small: and 
if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged 
ever in the deepest thickets, you too might 
live on into later generations and astonish 
men by your stalwart age and the trophies 
of an immemorial success. 

For the forest takes away from you all ex- 
cuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin 

•31 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

or thwart your free desires. Here all the im- 
pudencies of the brawling world reach you 
no more. You may count your hours, like 
Endymion, by the strokes of the lone wood- 
cutter, or by the progression of the lights 
and shadows and the sun wheehng his 
wide circuit through the naked heavens. 
Here shall you see no enemies but winter 
and rough weather. And if a pang comes to 
you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hun- 
ger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking 
repentance, all this talk of duty that is no 
duty, in the great peace, in the pure day- 
light of these woods, fall away from you 
like a garment. And if perchance you come 
forth upon an eminence, where the wind 
blows upon you large and fresh, and the 
pines knock their long stems together, Hke 
an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far 
away over the plain a factory chimney de- 
fined against the pale horizon — it is for you, 
as for the staid and simple peasant when, 
with his plough, he upturns old arms and 
harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, 
sure enough, there was a battle there in the 
old times ; and, sure enough, there is a world 
132 



FOREST NOTES 

out yonder where men strive together with 
a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous 
dispute. So much you apprehend by an ath- 
letic aft of the imagination. A f^iint far-off 
rumour as of Merovingian wars ; a legend as 
of some dead religion. 




13^ 




VI 

A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN 
FRANCE^ 

A Fragment^ ^^79 

Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of 
" Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 

fi MONASTIER is the chief place of 
a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the 
ancient Velay. As the name betok- 
ens, the town is of monastic origin; and it 
still contains a towered bulk of monastery 
and a church of some architeftural preten- 
sions, the seat of an archpriest and several 
vicars. It stands on the side of a hill above 
the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from 
Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves 
sometimes pursue the diligence in winter. 
The road, which is bound for Vivarais, 
passes through the town from end to end 
in a single narrow street; there you may see 
the fountain where women fill their pitch- 

* Reprinted by permission of John Lane. 
»34 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

ers; there also some old houses with carved 
doors and pediments and ornamental work 
in iron. For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayr- 
shire, was a sort of country capital, where 
thelocal aristocracy had theirtownmansions 
for the winter; and there is a certain baron 
still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent, 
who found means to ruin himself by high 
living in this village on the hills. He certainly 
has claims to be considered the most re- 
markable spendthrift on record. How he set 
about it, in a place where there are no lux- 
uries for sale, and where the board at the 
best inn comes to little more than a shilling 
a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, 
ruined as the family was, went as far as 
Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases 
of father and son mark an epoch in the his- 
tory of centralisation in France. Not until 
the latter had got into the train was the 
work of Richelieu complete. 

It is a people of lace-makers. The women 
sit in the streets by groups of five or six; 
and the noise of the bobbins is audible from 
one group to another. Now and then you 
will hear one woman clattering off prayers 

'35 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

for the edification of the others at their 
work. They wear gaudy shawls, white caps 
with a gay ribbon about the head, and some- 
times a black felt brigand hat above the cap; 
and so they give the street colour and bright- 
ness and a foreign air. A while ago, when 
England largely supplied herself from this 
distrid with the lace called torchon, it was 
not unusual to earn five francs a day; and 
five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in 
London. Now, from a change in the mar- 
ket, it takes a clever and industrious work- 
woman to earn from three to four in the 
week, or less than an eighth of what she 
made easily a few years ago. The tide of 
prosperity came and went, as with our 
northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer. 
The women bravely squandered their gains, 
kept the men in idleness, and gave them- 
selves up, as I was told, to sweethearting 
and a merry life. From week's end to week's 
end it was one continuous gala in Monastier; 
people spent the day in the wine-shops, and 
the drum or the bagpipes led on the bour- 
recs up to ten at night. Now these dancing 
days are over. ''II ny a plus de jeunesse,'* 
136 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

said Vi6lor the gar^on. I hear of no great 
advance in what are thought the essentials 
of moraHty; but the hoiirree, with its ram- 
bling, sweet, interminable music, and alert 
and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, 
and is mostly remembered as a custom of 
the past. Only on the occasion of the fair 
shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in 
a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company 
singing the measure while the others dance. 
I am sorry at the change, and marvel once 
more at the complicated scheme of things 
upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion 
in England can silence so much mountain 
merriment in France. The lace-makers them- 
selves have not entirely forgiven our coun- 
trywomen; and I think they take a special 
pleasure in the legend of the northern 
quarter of the town, called L'Anglade, be- 
cause there the English free-lances were ar- 
rested and driven back by the potency of a 
little Virgin Mary on the wall. 

From time to time a market is held, and 
the town has a season of revival; cattle and 
pigs are stabled in the streets; and pick- 
pockets have been known to come all the 

137 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

way from Lyons for the occasion. Every 
Sunday the country folk throng in with day- 
light to buy apples, to attend mass, and to 
visit one of the wine-shops, of which there 
are no fewer than fifty in this little town. 
Sunday wear for the men is a green tailcoat 
of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually 
a complete suit to match. 1 have never set 
eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it 
clings, there bulges; and the human body, 
with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned 
into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another 
piece of Sunday business with the peasants 
is to take their ailments to the chemist for 
advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as 
church-going. 1 have seen a woman who 
had been unable to speak since the Monday 
before, wheezing, catching her breath, end- 
lessly and painfully coughing; and yet she 
had waited upwards of a hundred hours be- 
fore coming to seek help, and had the week 
been twice as long, she would have waited 
still. There was a canonical day for consulta- 
tion; such was the ancestral habit, to which 
a respedable lady must study to conform. 
Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, 
138 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

but they rival each other in polite conces- 
sions rather than in speed. Each will wait an 
hour or two hours cheerfully while an old 
lady does her marketing or a gentleman 
finishes the papers in a cafe. The Courrier 
(such is the name of one) should leave Le 
Puy by two in the afternoon on the return 
voyage, and arrive at Monastier in good time 
for a six-o'clock dinner. But the driver dares 
not disoblige his customers. He will post- 
pone his departure again and again, hour 
after hour; and I have known the sun to go 
down on his delay. These purely personal 
favours, this consideration of men's fancies, 
rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, 
as marking the advance of the abstraction, 
time, makes a more humorous business of 
stage-coaching than we are used to see it. 
As far as the eye can reach, one swelling 
line of hill top rises and falls behind another; 
and if you climb an eminence, it is only to 
see new and farther ranges behind these. 
Many little rivers run from all sides in cliffy 
valleys; and one of them, a few miles from 
Monastier, bears the great name of Loire. 
The mean level of the country is a little 

139 



£SSAVS AND CRITICISMS 

more than three thousand feet above the sea, 
which makes the atmosphere proportion- 
ally brisk and wholesome. There is little tim- 
ber except pines, and the greater part of the 
country lies in moorland pasture. The coun- 
try is wild and tumbled rather than com- 
manding; an upland rather than a mountain 
distrid ; and the most striking as well as the 
most agreeable scenery lies low beside the 
rivers. There, indeed, you will find many 
corners that take the fancy; such as made 
the English noble choose his grave by a 
Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her 
freshest, and looks as young as on the 
seventh morning. Such a place is the course 
of the Gazeille, where it waters the common 
of Monastier and thence downwards till it 
joins the Loire ; a place to hear birds singing ; 
a place for lovers to frequent. The name of 
the river was perhaps suggested by the 
sound of its passage over the stones; for it 
is a great warbler, and at night, after I was 
in bed at Monastier, I could hear it go sing- 
ing down the valley till I fell asleep. 

On the whole, this is a Scottish land- 
scape, although not so noble as the best in 
140 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the 
population is, in its way, as Scottish as the 
country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fife- 
shire manners, and accost you, as if you 
were trespassing, with an ''Onst-ce que 
vovis allei ? ' ' only translatable into the Low- 
land * ' Whaur ye gaun ? " They keep the Scot- 
tish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that 
day but to drive in and out the various pigs 
and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant 
a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers 
have disappeared from the street. Not to at- 
tend mass would involve social degradation ; 
and you may find people reading Sunday 
books, in particular a sort of Cathohc Month- 
ly l^isitor on the doings of Our Lady of 
Lourdes. I remember one Sunday, when I 
was walking in the country, that I fell on a 
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from 
the patriarch to the baby, gathered in the 
shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping 
lass stood with her back to the wall and did 
the solo part, the rest chiming in devoutly. 
Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep 
among some straw, to represent the worldly 

element. 

141 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

Again, this people is eager to proselytise; 
and the postmaster's daughter used to argue 
with me by the half-hour about my heresy, 
until she grew quite flushed. I have heard 
the reverse process going on between a 
Scotswoman and a French girl; and the ar- 
guments in the two cases were identical. 
Each apostle based her claim on the superior 
virtue and attainments of her clergy, and 
clenched the business with a threat of hell- 
fire. "Pas bong pretres ici/' said the Presby- 
terian, "hong pretres en Ecosse." And the 
postmaster's daughter, taking up the same 
weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the 
butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a 
hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded 
for our good. One cheerful circumstance I 
note in these guerilla missions, that each 
side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catho- 
lic alike address themselves to a supposed 
misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I 
call it cheerful, for faith is a more support- 
ing quality than imagination. 

Here, as in Scotland, many peasant fami- 
lies boast a son in holy orders. And here 
also, the young men have a tendency to 
142 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

emigrate. It is certainly not poverty that 
drives them to the great cities or across the 
seas, for many peasant famiHes, I was told, 
have a fortune of at least 40,000 francs. The 
lads go forth pricked with the spirit of ad- 
venture and the desire to rise in life, and 
leave their homespun elders grumbling and 
wondering over the event. Once, at a village 
called Laussonne, I met one of these disap- 
pointed parents: a drake who had fethered a 
wild swan and seen it take wing and disap- 
pear. The wild swan in question was now 
an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by 
way of Bordeaux, and first landed in Amer- 
ica, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a 
single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he 
was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing 
is an adventurous life! I thought he might as 
well have stayed at home; but you never 
can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in 
what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, an- 
other to marry, a third to write scurrilous 
articles and be repeatedly caned in public, 
and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an 
apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, 
he could conceive no reason for the lad's 

>43 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

behaviour. *M had always bread for him," 
he said; **he ran away to annoy me. He 
loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." 
But at heart he was swelling with pride 
over his travelled offspring, and he produced 
a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, 
it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, 
and waved it gloriously in the air. "This 
comes from America," he cried, "six thou- 
sand leagues away!" And the wine-shop 
audience looked upon it with a certain thrill. 
I soon became a popular figure, and was 
known for miles in the country. Oit'st-ce 
que vous allei? was changed for me into 
Quot,vom rentrei au Monastier ce soir? and 
in the town itself every urchin seemed to 
know my name, although no living creature 
could pronounce it. There was one particu- 
lar group of lace-makers who brought out a 
chair for me whenever I went by, and de- 
tained me from my walk to gossip. They 
were filled with curiosity about England, its 
language, its religion, the dress of the wo- 
men, and were never weary of seeing the 
Queen's head on English postage-stamps or 
seeking for French words in English Jour- 
'44 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

nals. The language, in particular, filled them 
with surprise. 

** Do they speak /)(^/o/s in England?" I was 
once asked ; and when I told them not, "Ah, 
then, French?" said they. 

*'No, no," I said, ''not French." 

* ' Then, " they concluded, ' * they speak pa- 
toisr 

You must obviously either speak French 
or patois. Talk of the force of logic — here it 
was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, 
but proceeding to give illustrations of my 
native jargon, 1 was met with a new morti- 
fication. Of all/) J /o/^' they declared that mine 
was the most preposterous and the most 
jocose in sound. At each new word there 
was a new explosion of laughter, and some 
of the younger ones were glad to rise from 
their chairs and stamp about the street in 
ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in 
a faint and slightly disagreeable bewilder- 
ment. ''Bread," which sounds a common- 
place, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, 
was the word that most delighted these good 
ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolic- 
some and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and 

J 45 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand- 
by, I presume, for winter evenings. I have 
tried it since then with every sort of accent 
and infle6lion, but I seem to lack the sense 
of humour. 

They were of all ages: children at their 
first web of lace, a stripling girl with a bash- 
ful but encouraging play of eyes, solid mar- 
ried women, and grandmothers, some on 
the top of their age and some falling towards 
decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and 
natural, ready to laugh and ready with a cer- 
tain quiet solemnity when that was called 
for by the subjed of our talk. Life, since the 
fall in wages, had begun to appear to them 
with a more serious air. The stripling girl 
would sometimes laugh at me in a provoca- 
tive and not unadmiring manner, if I judge 
aright; and one of the grandmothers, who 
was my great friend of the party, gave me 
many a sharp word of judgment on my 
sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, 
and gave them with a wry mouth and a hu- 
morous twinkle in her eye that were emi- 
nently Scottish. But the rest used me with a 
certain reverence, as something come from 
146 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

afar and not entirely human. Nothing would 
put them at their ease but the irresistible 
gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old 
lady and myself I think there was a real at- 
tachment. She was never weary of sitting 
to me for her portrait, in her best cap and 
brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily 
composed, and though she never failed to 
repudiate the result, she would always insist 
upon another trial. It was as good as a play 
to see her sitting in judgment over the last. 
"No, no," she would say, "that is not it. I 
am old, to be sure, but 1 am better-looking 
than that. We must try again." When I was 
about to leave she bade me good-bye for this 
life in a somewhat touching manner. We 
should not meet again, she said; it was a 
long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is 
so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows .^ 
I have said good-bye to people for greater 
distances and times, and, please God, I mean 
to see them yet again. 

One thing was notable about these wo- 
men, from the youngest to the oldest, and 
with hardly an exception. In spite of their 
piety, they could twang off an oath with Sir 

'47 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

Toby Belch in person. There was nothing so 
high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the 
human body, but a woman of this neighbour- 
hood would whip out the name of it, fair and 
square, by way of conversational adornment. 
My landlady, who was pretty and young, 
dressed like a lady and avoided patois like a 
weakness, commonly addressed her child in 
the language of a drunken bully. And of all 
the swearers that 1 ever heard, commend me 
to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the 
Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse 
was not yet ended when I had finished it and 
took my departure. It is true she had a right 
to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking 
fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the 
day was well begun. But it was strange to 
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and ob- 
scenities, endless like a river, and now and 
then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the 
clear and silent air of the morning. In city 
slums, the thing might have passed un- 
noticed; but in a country valley, and from a 
plain and honest countrywoman, this beast- 
liness of speech surprised the ear. 

The CondtiSlor, as he is called of Roads 
148 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

and Bridges was my principal companion. 
He was generally intelligent, and could have 
spoken more or less falsetto on any of the 
trite topics; but it was his specialty to have 
a generous taste in eating. This was what 
was most indigenous in the man; it was 
here he was an artist; and I found in his 
company what I had long suspeded, that 
enthusiasm and special knowledge are the 
great social qualities, and what they are 
about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's 
plays, an altogether secondary question. 

I used to accompany the Conductor on 
his professional rounds, and grew to believe 
myself an expert in the business. I thought 
I could make an entry in a stone-breaker's 
time-book, or order manure off the way- 
side with any living engineer in France. 
Gondet was one of the places we visited to- 
gether; and Laussonne, where I met the 
apothecary's father, was another. There, at 
Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while 
she was gathering materials for the Marquis 
de Villemer; and I have spoken with an old 
man, who was then a child running about 
the inn kitchen, and who still remembers 

149 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

her with a sort of reverence. It appears that 
he spoke French imperfeftly ; for this reason 
George Sand chose him for companion, and 
whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque 
phrase \n patois, she would make him repeat 
it again and again till it was graven in her 
memory. The word for a frog particularly 
pleased her fancy; and it would be curious 
to know if she afterwards employed it in her 
works. The peasants, who knew nothing of 
letters and had never so much as heard of 
local colour, could not explain her chatter- 
ing with this backward child; and to them 
she seemed a very homely lady and far from 
beautiful : the most famous man-killer of the 
age appealed so little to Velaisian swine- 
herds! 

On my first engineering excursion, which 
lay up by Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc 
and the borders of Ardeche, 1 began an im- 
proving acquaintance with theforeman road- 
mender. He was in great glee at having me 
with him, passed me off among his subal- 
terns as the supervising engineer, and in- 
sisted on what he called ''the gallantry " of 
paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine- 
150 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

shop. On the whole, he was a man of great 
weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social 
temper. But I am afraid he was superstitious. 
When he was nine years old, he had seen 
one night a company of bourgeois et dames 
qui faisaient la manege avec des chaises, and 
concluded that he was in the presence of a 
witches' Sabbath. I suppose, but venture 
with timidity on the suggestion, that this 
may have been a romantic and nocturnal 
picnic party. Again, coming from Pradelles 
with his brother, they saw a great empty 
cart drawn by six enormous horses before 
them on the road. The driver cried aloud 
and filled the mountains with the cracking 
of his whip. He never seemed to go faster 
than a walk, yet it was impossible to over- 
take him; and at length, at the corner of a 
hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily 
into the night. At the time, people said it 
was the devil qui s'amiisait a fair e fa. 

I suggested there was nothing more like- 
ly, as he must have some amusement. 

The foreman said it was odd, but there 
was less of that sort of thing than formerly. 
''C'est difficile, ' ' he added, " a expliquer. 

i5» 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

When we were well up on the moors and 
the Condu^or was trying some road-metal 
with the gauge — 

" Hark ! " said the foreman, '* do you hear 
nothing?" 

We listened, and the wind, which was 
blowing chilly out of the east, brought a 
faint, tangled jangling to our ears. 

" It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he. 

For every summer, the flocks out of all 
Ardeche are brought up to pasture on these 
grassy plateaux. 

Here and there a little private flock was 
being tended by a girl, one spinning with 
a distaff, another seated on a wall and in- 
tently making lace. This last, when we ad- 
dressed her, leaped up in a panic and put 
out her arms, like a person swimming, to 
keep us at a distance, and it was some sec- 
onds before we could persuade her of the 
honesty of our intentions. 

The ConduSlor told me of another herds- 
woman from whom he had once asked his 
road while he was yet new to the country, 
and who fled from him, driving her beasts 
before her, until he had given up the infor- 
152 



A MOUNTAIN TOWN 

mation in despair. A tale of old lawlessness 
may yet be read in these uncouth timidities. 
The winter in these uplands is a danger- 
ous and melancholy time. Houses are snowed 
up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail 
of their own fireside. No man ventures abroad 
without meat and a bottle of wine, which 
he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even 
thus equipped he takes the road with terror. 
All day the family sits about the fire in a 
foul and airless hovel, and equally without 
work or diversion. The father may carve a 
rude piece of furniture, but that is all that 
will be done until the spring sets in again, 
and along with it the labours of the field. 
It is not for nothing that you find a clock in 
the meanest of these mountain habitations. 
A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, 
were indispensable in such a life. . . . 




^53 



LITERARY PAPERS 




I 

THE MORALITY OF THE 
PROFESSION OF LETTERS^ 

JHE profession of letters has been 
lately debated in the public prints; 
and it has been debated, to put the 
matter mildly, from a point of view that was 
calculated to surprise high-minded men, and 
bring a general contempt on books and read- 
ing. Some time ago, in particular, a lively, 
pleasant, popular writer^ devoted an essay, 
lively and pleasant like himself, to a very en- 
couraging view of the profession. We may 
be glad that his experience is so cheering, 
and we may hope that all others, who de- 
serve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; 
but I do not think we need be at all glad to 
have this question, so important to the 
public and ourselves, debated solely on the 

^ First published in the Fortnightly Review, April, 
1881. 
. '^Mr. James Payn. 

157 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

ground of money. The salary in any business 
under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the 
first, question. That you should continue to 
exist is a matter for your own consideration ; 
but that your business should be first honest, 
and second useful, are points in which hon- 
our and morality are concerned. If the writer 
to whom I refer succeeds in persuading a 
number of young persons to adopt this way 
of life with an eye set singly on the liveli- 
hood, we must exped them in their works 
to follow profit only, and we must exped in 
consequence, if he will pardon me the epi- 
thets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty 
literature. Of that writer himself I am not 
speaking: he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; 
we all owe him periods of entertainment, 
and he has achieved an amiable popularity 
which he has adequately deserved. But the 
truth is, he does not, or did not when he 
first embraced it, regard his profession from 
this purely mercenary side. He went into it, 
I shall venture to say, if not with any noble 
design, at least in the ardour of a first love; 
and he enjoyed its practice long before he 
paused to calculate the wage. The other day 
158 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

an author was complimented on a piece of 
work, good in itself and exceptionally good 
for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of 
a commercial traveller, that as the book was 
not briskly selling he did not give a copper 
farthing for its merit. It must not be sup- 
posed that the person to whom this answer 
was addressed received it as a profession of 
faith; he knew, on the other hand, that it 
was only a whiff of irritation; just as we 
know, when a respedable writer talks of 
literature as a way of life, like shoemaking, 
but not so useful, that he is only debating 
one asped of a question, and is still clearly 
conscious of a dozen others more important 
in themselves and more central to the matter 
in hand. But while those who treat literature 
in this penny-wise and virtue-foolish spirit 
are themselves truly in possession of a better 
light, it does not follow that the treatment is 
decent or improving, whether for themselves 
or others. To treat all subjeds in the high- 
est, the most honourable, and the pluckiest 
spirit, consistent with the fad, is the first 
duty of a writer. If he be well paid, as I am 
glad to hear he is this duty becomes the 

'59 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

more urgent, the negle(5l of it the more dis- 
graceful. And perhaps there is no subjed on 
which a man should speak so gravely as that 
industry, whatever it may be, which is the 
occupation or delight of his life ; which is his 
tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it 
be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere in- 
cubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the 
shoulders of labouring humanity. On that 
subject alone even to force the note might 
lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a 
numerous and enterprising generation,!; of 
writers will follow and surpass the present 
one; but it would be better if the stream 
were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest 
English books were closed, than that esuri- 
ent book-makers should continue and de- 
base a brave tradition, and lower, in their 
own eyes, a famous race. Better that our 
serene temples were deserted than filled 
with trafficking and juggling priests. 

There are two just reasons for the choice 
of any way of life: thejirst-is inbred taste in 
the chooser; the second some high utility 
in the industry selected. Literature, like any 
other art, is singularly interesting to the ar- 
i6o 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

tist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among 
the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are 
the sufficient justifications for any young 
man or woman who adopts it as the busi- 
ness of his life. 1 shall not say much about 
the wages. A writer can live by his writ- 
ing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, 
then less luxuriously. The nature of the 
work he does all day will more affe(ft his 
happiness than the quality of his dinner at 
night. Whatever be your calling, and how- 
ever much it brings you in the year, you 
could still, you know, get more by cheating. 
We all suffer ourselves to be too much con- 
cerned about a little poverty; but such con- 
siderations should not move us in the choice 
of that which is to be the business and jus- 
tification of so great a portion of our lives; 
and like the missionary, the patriot, or the 
philosopher, we should all choose that poor 
and brave career in which we can do the 
most and best for mankind. Now nature, 
faithfully followed, proves herself a careful 
mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle 
of words, betakes himself to letters for his 
life; by-and-by, when he learns moregrav- 

i6i 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

ity, he finds that he has chosen better than 
he knew ; that if he earns Httle, he is earning 
it amply; that if he receives a small wage, he 
is in a position to do considerable services; 
that it is in his power, in some small meas- 
ure, to protect the oppressed and to defend 
the truth. So kindly is the world arranged, 
such great profit may arise from a small de- 
gree of human reliance on oneself, and such, 
in particular, is the happy star of this trade 
of writing, that it should combine pleasure 
and profit to both parties, and be at once 
agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good 
preaching. 

This is to speak of literature at its high- 
est; and with the four great elders who are 
still spared to our respeft and admiration, 
with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Ten- 
,nyson before usrTt~~woiiid -be cowardly to 
consider it at first in any lesser asped. But 
while we cannot follow these athletes, 
while we may none of us, perhaps, be very 
vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still 
contend that, in the humblest sort of liter- 
ary work, we have it in our power either to 
do great harm or great good. We may seek 
162 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

merely to please; we may seek, having no 
higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine 
days' curiosity of our contemporaries ; or we 
may essay, however feebly, to instrud. In 
each of these we shall have to deal with that 
remarkable art of words which, because it 
is the diale6t of life, comes home so easily 
and powerfully to the minds of men; and 
since that is so, we contribute, in each of 
these branches, to build up the sum of senti- 
ments and appreciations which goes by the 
name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. 
The total of a nation's reading, in these days 
of daily papers, greatly modifies the total 
of the nation's speech; and the speech and 
reading, taken together, form the efficient 
educational medium of youth. A good man 
or woman may keep a youth some little 
while in clearer air; but the contemporary 
atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the 
average of mediocre characters. The copious 
Corinthian baseness of the American re- 
porter or the Parisian chroniquear^ both so 
lightly readable, must exercise an incalcula- 
ble influence for ill ; they touch upon all sub- 
jects, and on all with the same ungenerous 

163 



BSSAVS AND CRITICISMS 

hand; they begin the consideration of all, in 
young and unprepared minds, in an un- 
worthy spirit; on all, they supply some 
pungency for dull people to quote. The mere 
body of this ugly matter overwhelms the 
rare utterances of good men; the sneering, 
the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered 
in broad sheets on every table, while the 
antidote, in small volumes, lies unread up- 
on the shelf. I have spoken of the American 
and the French, not because they are so 
much baser, but so much more readable, 
than the Enghsh; their evil is done more 
effectively, in America for the masses, in 
French for the few that care to read ; but 
with us as with them, the duties of litera- 
ture are daily negleded, truth daily per- 
verted and suppressed, and grave subjeds 
daily degraded in the treatment. The jour- 
nalist is not reckoned an important officer; 
yet judge of the good he might do, the harm 
he does; judge of it by one instance only: 
that when we find two journals on the re- 
verse sides of politics each, on the same day, 
openly garbling a piece of news for the in- 
terest of its own party, we smile at the dis- 
164 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

covery (no discovery now!) as over a good 
joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so 
open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of 
the things that we profess to teach our young 
is a resped for truth; and I cannot think this 
piece of education will be crowned with any 
great success, so long as some of us praftise 
and the rest openly approve of public false- 
hood. 

There are two duties incumbent upon any 
man who enters on the business of writing: 
truth to the fad and a good spirit in the 
treatment. In every department of literature, 
though so low as hardly to deserve the name, 
truth to the fadl is of importance to the edu- 
cation and comfort of mankind, and so hard 
to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so 
will lend some dignity to the man who 
tries it. Our judgments are based upon two 
things: first^jLiponthe original preferences 
of our soul ; buF, second, upon the mass of 
testimony to the nature of God, man, and 
the universe which reaches us, in divers 
manners, from without. For the most part 
these divers manners are reducible to one, 
all that we learn of past times and much that 

165 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

we learn of our own reaching us through 
the medium of books or papers, and even 
he who cannot read learning from the same 
source at second-hand and by the report of 
him who can. Thus the sum of the con- 
temporary knowledge or ignorance of good 
and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork 
of those who write. Those who write have 
to see that each man's knowledge is, as near 
as they can make it, answerable to the fads 
of life; that he shall not suppose himself an 
angel or a monster; nor take this world for 
a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all 
rights are concentred in his own caste or 
country, or all veracities in his own paro- 
chial creed. Each man should learn what is 
within him, that he may strive to mend; 
he must be taught what is without him, 
that he may be kind to others. It can never 
be wrong to tell him the truth ; for, in his 
disputable state, weaving as he goes his 
theory of life steering himself, cheering 
or reproving others, all fa6ls are of the first 
importance to his condu6l; and even if a 
fad shall discourage or corrupt him, it is 
still best that he should know it; for it is in 
166 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

this world as it is, and not in a world made 
easy by educational suppressions, that he 
must win his way to shame or glory. In one 
word, it must always be foul to tell what is 
false; and it can never be safe to suppress 
what is true. The very fad that you omit 
may be the fa6l which somebody was want- 
ing, for one man's meat is another man's 
poison, and I have known a person who 
was cheered by the perusal of Candide. 
Every fad is a part of that great puzzle we 
must set together; and none that comes 
diredly in a writer's path but has some nice 
relations, unperceivable by him, to the to- 
tality and bearing of the subjed under hand. 
Yet there are certain classes of fad eternally 
more necessary than others, and it is with 
these that literature must first bestir itself. 
They are not hard to distinguish, nature 
once more easily leading us; for the neces- 
sary, because the efficacious, fads are those 
which are most interesting to the natural 
mind of man. Those which are coloured, 
piduresque, human, and rooted in morality, 
and those, on the other hand, which are 
clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are 

167 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

alone vital in importance, seizing by their 
interest, or useful to communicate. So idx as 
the writer merely narrates, he should princi- 
pally tell of these. He should tell of the kind 
and wholesome and beautiful elements of 
our life; he should tell unsparingly of the 
evil and sorrow of the present, to move us 
with instances; he should tell of wise and 
good people in the past, to excite us by ex- 
ample; and of these he should tell soberly 
and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we 
may neither grow discouraged with our- 
selves nor exacting to our neighbours. So 
the body of contemporary literature, ephem- 
eral and feeble in itself, touches in the 
minds of men the springs of thought and 
kindness, and supports them (for those who 
will go at all are easily supported) on their 
way to what is true and right. And if, in any 
degree, it does so now, how much more 
might it do so if the writers chose! There is 
not a life in all the records of the past but, 
properly studied, might lend a hint and a 
help to some contemporary. There is not a 
juncture in to-day's affairs but some useful 
word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter 
1 68 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

has an office, and, with clear eyes and honest 
language, may unveil injustices and point 
the way to progress. And for a last word : in 
all narration there is only one way to be 
clever, and that is to be exad. To be vivid is 
a secondary quality which must presuppose 
the first; for vividly to convey a wrong im- 
pression is only to make failure conspicu- 
ous. 

But a fa(5l may be viewed on many sides ; it 
may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, 
indifference, or admiration, and by each of 
these the story will be transformed to some- 
thing else. The newspapers that told of the 
return of our representatives from Berlin, 
even if they had not differed as to the fa6ls, 
would have sufficiently differed by their 
spirits; so that the one description would 
have been a second ovation, and the other a 
prolonged insult. The subject makes but a 
trifling part of any piece of literature, and the 
view of the writer is itself a fa(5l more impor- 
tant because less disputable than the others. 
Now this spirit in which a subject is re- 
garded, important in all kinds of literary 
work, becomes all-important in works of 

169 



ASSAYS AND CRITICISMS 

fidlion, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it 
not only colours but itself chooses the fa6ts; 
not only modifies but shapes the work. And 
hence, over the far larger proportion of the 
field of literature, the health or disease of the 
writer's mind or momentary humour forms 
not only the leading feature of his work, but 
is, at bottom, the only thing he can commu- 
nicate to others. In all works of art, widely 
speaking, it is first of all the author's attitude 
that is narrated, though in the attitude there 
be implied a whole experience and a theory 
of life. An author who has begged the ques- 
tion and reposes in some narrow faith can- 
not, if he would, express the whole or even 
many of the sides of this various existence; 
for, his own life being maim, some of them 
are not admitted in his theory, and were 
only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his 
experience. Hence the smallness, the trite- 
ness, and the inhumanity in works of merely 
sed:arian religion; and hence we find equal 
although unsimilar limitation in works in- 
spired by the spirit of the flesh or the despi- 
cable taste for high society. So that the first 
duty of any man who is to write is intellec- 
170 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

tual. Designedly or not, he has so far set him- 
self up for a leader of the minds of men ; and 
he must see that his own mind is kept supple, 
charitable, and bright. Everything but preju- 
dice should find a voice through him; he 
should see the good in all things; where he 
has even a fear that he does not wholly un- 
derstand, there he should be wholly silent; 
and he should recognise from the first that 
he has only one tool in his workshop, and 
that tool is sympathy.' 

The second duty, far harder to define, is 
moral. There are a thousand different hu- 
mours in the mind, and about each of them, 
when it is uppermost, some literature tends 
to be deposited. Is this to be allowed } Not 
certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in 
more than rigourists would fancy. It were 
to be desired that all literary work, and 
chiefly works of art, issued from sound, hu- 

* A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example 
set before all young writers in the width of literary sym- 
pathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to wel- 
come merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in 
Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude 
we should all seek to preserve, not only in that, but in 
every branch of literary work. 

171 



ESSA VS AND CRITICISMS 

man, healthy, and potent impulses, whether 
grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or 
religious. Yet it cannot be denied that some 
valuable books are partially insane: some, 
mostly religious, partially inhuman; and 
very many tainted with morbidity and im- 
potence. We do not loathe a masterpiece 
although we gird against its blemishes. We 
are not, above all, to look for faults, but 
merits. There is no book perfed, even in 
design ; but there are many that will delight, 
improve, or encourage the reader. On the 
one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only 
religious poetry on earth; yet they contain 
sallies that savour rankly of the man of 
blood. On the other hand, Alfred de Musset 
had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am 
only quoting that generous and frivolous 
giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him of a 
bad heart; yet, when the impulse under 
which he wrote was purely creative, he 
could give us works like Carmosine or Faii- 
tcuio, in which the last note of the romantic 
comedy seems to have been found again to 
touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote 
Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly 
172 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

of a somewhat morbid realism ; and behold ! 
the book turned in his hands into a master- 
piece of appalling morality. But the truth is, 
when books are conceived under a great 
stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine 
times heated and eledrified by effort, the 
conditions of our being are seized with such 
an ample grasp, that, even should the main 
design be trivial or base, some truth and 
beauty cannot fail to be expressed. Out of 
the strong comes forth sweetness; but an 
ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and 
bottom. And so this can be no encourage- 
ment to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, 
who must take their business conscientious- 
ly or be ashamed to practise it. 

Man is imperfed; yet, in his literature, he 
must express himself and his own views and 
preferences; for to do anything else is to do 
a far more perilous thing than to risk being 
immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. 
To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to 
travesty a sentiment; that will not be help- 
ful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure 
you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. 
There is probably no point of view possible 

»73 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

to a sane man but contains some truth and, 
in the true connexion, might be profitable to 
the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any 
one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts 
of it impertinently uttered. There is a time 
to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh 
as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic 
as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a 
man were to combine all these extremes in- 
to his work, each in its place and propor- 
tion, that work would be the world's mas- 
terpiece of morality as well as of art. Par- 
tiality is immorality; for any book is wrong 
that gives a misleading pifture of the world 
and life. The trouble is that the weakling- 
must be partial; the work of one proving 
dank and depressing; of another, cheap and 
vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a 
fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in 
condud, you can never hope to do exadly 
right. All you can do is to make as sure as 
possible; and for that there is but one rule. 
Nothing should be done in a hurry that can 
be done slowly. It is no use to write a book 
and put it by for nine or even ninety years; 
for in the writing you will have partly con- 
'74 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

vinced yourself; the delay must precede any 
beginning; and if you meditate a work of 
art, you should first long roll the subject 
under the tongue to make sure you like the 
flavour, before you brew a volume that shall 
taste of it from end to end; or if you pro- 
pose to enter on the field of controversy, 
you should first have thought upon the 
question under all conditions, in health as 
well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in 
joy. It is this nearness of examination nec- 
essary for any true and kind writing, that 
makes the practice of the art a prolonged 
and noble education for the writer. 

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to 
say over again, in the meantime. Any liter- 
ary work which conveys faithful fads or 
pleasing impressions is a service to the pub- 
lic. It is even a service to be thankfully proud 
of having rendered. The slightest novels are 
a blessing to those in distress, not chloro- 
form itself a greater. Our fine old sea-cap- 
tain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed 
his mind with The King's Own or Newton 
Forster. To please is to serve; and so far 
from its being difficult to instruct while you 

>75 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

amuse, it is difficult to do the one thorough- 
ly without the other. Some part of the 
writer or his life will crop out in even a 
vapid book; and to read a novel that was 
conceived with any force is to multiply ex- 
perience and to exercise the sympathies. 
Every article, every piece of verse, every 
essay, every entre-filet, is destined to pass, 
however swiftly, through the minds of some 
portion of the public, and to colour, how- 
ever transiently, their thoughts. When any 
subjed; falls to be discussed, some scribbler 
on a paper has the invaluable opportunity 
of beginning its discussion in a dignified 
and human spirit; and if there were enough 
who did so in our public press, neither the 
public nor the Parliament would find it in 
their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. 
The writer has the chance to stumble, by 
the way, on something pleasing, something 
interesting, something encouraging, were it 
only to a single reader. He will be unfor- 
tunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the 
chance, besides, to stumble on something 
that a dull person shall be able to compre- 
hend; and for a dull person to have read 
176 



PROFESSION OF LETTERS 

anything and, for that once, comprehended 
it, makes a marking epoch in his education. 
Here, then, is work worth doing and 
worth trying to do well. And so, if I were 
minded to welcome any great accession to 
our trade, it should not be from any reason 
of a higher wage, but because it was a 
trade which was useful in a very great and 
in a very high degree; which every honest 
tradesman could make more serviceable to 
mankind in his single strength; which was 
difficult to do well and possible to do better 
every year; which called for scrupulous 
thought on the part of all who pradised it, 
and hence became a perpetual education to 
their nobler natures; and which, pay it as 
you please, in the large majority of the best 
cases will still be underpaid. For surely, at 
this time of day in the nineteenth century, 
there is nothing that an honest man should 
fear more timorously than gettingand spend- 
ing more than he deserves. 



'77 




II 

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELE- 
MENTS OF STYLE IN 
LITERATURE^ 

>HERE is nothing more disenchant- 
ing to man than to be shown the 
springs and mechanism of any art. 
All our arts and occupations lie wholly on 
the surface; it is on the surface that we per- 
ceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; 
and to pry below is to be appalled by their 
emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of 
the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, 
psychology itself, when pushed to any nice- 
ty, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but 
rather from the fault of our analysis than 
from any poverty native to the mind. And 
perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: 
those disclosures which seem fatal to the 
dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the 

^ First published in the Contemporary Review, April, 
1885. 

178 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

proportion of our ignorance; and those con- 
scious and unconscious artifices which it 
seems unworthy of the serious artist to em- 
ploy were yet, if we had the power to trace 
them to their springs, indications of a deli- 
cacy of the sense finer than we conceive, 
and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. 
This ignorance at least is largely irremedi- 
able. We shall never learn the affinities of 
beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and 
too far back in the mysterious history of 
man. The amateur, in consequence, will al- 
ways grudgingly receive details of method, 
which can be stated but never can wholly 
be explained ; nay, on the principle laid down 
in "Hudibras," that 

"Still the less they understand, 
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," 

many are conscious at each new disclosure 
of a diminution in the ardour of their pleas- 
ure. I must therefore warn that well-known 
character, the general reader, that I am here 
embarked upon a most distasteful business: 
taking down the picture from the wall and 
looking on the back; and, like the inquiring 
child, pulling the musical cart to pieces. 

179 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

^ I. Choice of Words. — The art of litera- 
ture stands apart from among its sisters, be- 
cause the material in which the literary artist 
works is the dialed of life; hence, on the one 
hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of 
address to the public mind, which is ready 
prepared to understand it; but hence, on the 
other, a singular limitation. The sister arts 
enjoy the use of a plastic and dudile ma- 
terial, like the modeller's clay; literature 
alone is condemned to work in mosaic with 
finite and quite rigid words. You have seen 
these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a 
pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or 
a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbi- 
trary size and figure that the literary archi- 
ted: is condemned to design the palace of 
his art. Nor is this all ; for since these blocks, 
or words, are the acknowledged currency of 
our daily affairs, there are here possible none 
of those suppressions by which other arts 
obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hie- 
roglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no 
inscrutable shadow, as in painting ; no blank 
wall, as in archite6ture; but every word, 
phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move 
180 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

in a logical progression, and convey a defi- 
nite conventional import. 

Now the first merit which attracts in the 
pages of a good writer, or the talk of a bril- 
liant conversationalist, is the apt choice and 
contrast of the words employed. It is, in- 
deed, a strange art to take these blocks, 
rudely conceived for the purpose of the mar- 
ket or the bar, and by tad of application 
touch them to the finest meanings and dis- 
tinctions, restore to them their primal en- 
ergy, wittily shift them to another issue, or 
make of them a drum to rouse the passions. 
But though this form of merit is without 
doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is far 
from being equally present in all writers. 
The efifeCl of words in Shakespeare, their 
singular justice, significance, and poetic 
charm, is different, indeed, from the effedl 
of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to 
take an example nearer home, the words in 
Carlyle seem eledrified into an energy of 
lineament, like the faces of men furiously 
moved; whilst the words in Macaulay, apt 
enough to convey his meaning, harmonious 
enough in sound, yet glide from the mem- 

181 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

ory like undistinguished elements in a gen- 
eral effe(ft. But the first class of writers have 
no monopoly of literary merit. There is a 
sense in which Addison is superior to Car- 
lyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than 
Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne : 
it certainly lies not in the choice of words; 
it lies not in the interest or value of the mat- 
ter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, 
or of humour. The three first are but infants 
to the three second; and yet each, in a par- 
ticular point of literary art, excels his su- 
perior in the whole. What is that point ? 

2. The Web. — Literature, although it 
stands apart by reason of the great destiny 
and general use of its medium in the affairs 
of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of 
these we may distinguish two great classes : 
those arts, Hke sculpture, painting, ading, 
which are representative, or, as used to be 
said very clumsily, imitative; and those, Hke 
architecture, music, and the dance, which 
are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. 
Each class, in right of this distindion, obeys 
principles apart; yet both may claim a com- 
mon ground of existence, and it may be said 
182 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

with sufficient justice that the motive and 
end of any art whatever is to make a pat- 
tern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of 
sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical 
figures, or imitative lines ; but still a pattern. 
That is the plane on which these sisters meet ; 
it is by this that they are arts; and if it be 
well they should at times forget their child- 
ish origin, addressing their intelligence to 
virile tasks, and performing unconsciously 
that necessary fundion of their life, to make 
a pattern, it is still imperative that the pat- 
tern shall be made. 

Music and literature, the two temporal 
arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in 
time; or, in other words, of sounds and 
pauses. Communication may be made in 
broken words, the business of life be carried 
on with substantives alone; but that is not 
what we call literature; and the true busi- 
ness of the literary artist is to plait or weave 
his meaning, involving it around itself; so 
that each sentence, by successive phrases, 
shall first come into a kind of knot, and 
then, after a moment of suspended mean- 
ing, solve and clear itself. In every properly 

183 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

construded sentence there should be ob- 
served this knot or hitch; so that (however 
delicately) we are led to foresee, to exped, 
and then to welcome the successive phrases. 
The pleasure may be heightened by an ele- 
ment of surprise, as, very grossly, in the 
common figure of the antithesis, or, with 
much greater subtlety, where an antithesis 
is first suggested and then deftly evaded. 
Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in it- 
self; and between the implication and the 
evolution of the sentence there should be a 
satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing 
more often disappoints the ear than a sen- 
tence solemnly and sonorously prepared, 
and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should 
the balance be too striking and exad, for 
the one rule is to be infinitely various; to 
interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet 
still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it 
were, the stitch, and yet still to give the 
efifed of an ingenious neatness. 

The conjurer juggles with two oranges, 
and our pleasure in beholding him springs 
from this, that neither is for an instant over- 
looked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His 
184 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

pattern, which is to please the supersensual 
ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first 
of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever 
be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies 
of the argument, the neatness of the fabric 
must not suffer, or the artist has been proved 
unequal to his design. And, on the other 
hand, no form of words must be seleded, 
no knot must be tied among the phrases, 
unless knot and word be precisely what is 
wanted to forward and illuminate the argu- 
ment; for to fail in this is to swindle in the 
game. The genius of prose rejeds the che- 
ville no less emphatically than the laws of 
verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps ex- 
plain to some of my readers, is any mean- 
ingless or very watered phrase employed to 
strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and 
argument Hve in each other; and it is by the 
brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the 
second, that we judge the strength and fit- 
ness of the first. 

Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, 
so to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up 
at once two or more elements or two or 
more views of the subjed in hand; com- 

185 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

bines, implicates, and contrasts them; and 
while, in one sense, he was merely seeking 
an occasion for the necessary knot, he will 
be found, in the other, to have greatly en- 
riched the meaning, or to have transacted 
the work of two sentences in the space of 
one. In the change from the successive shal- 
low statements of the old chronicler to the 
dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic 
narrative, there is implied a vast amount of 
both philosophy and wit. The philosophy 
we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic 
writer a far more deep and stimulating view 
of life, and a far keener sense of the genera- 
tion and affinity of events. The wit we might 
imagine to be lost; but it is not so, for it is 
just that wit, these perpetual nice contriv- 
ances, thesedifficulties overcome, this double 
purpose attained, these two oranges kept 
simultaneously dancing in the air, that, con- 
sciously or not, afford the reader his delight. 
Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the 
necessary organ of that philosophy which 
we so much admire. That style is therefore 
the most perfe6l, not, as fools say, which is 
the most natural, for the most natural is the 
186 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

disjointed babble of the chronicler; but 
which attains the highest degree of elegant 
and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or 
if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain 
to sense and vigour. Even the derangement 
of the phrases from their (so-called) natural 
order is luminous for the mind; and it is by 
the means of such designed reversal that the 
elements of a judgment may be most per- 
tinently marshalled, or the stages of a com- 
plicated action most perspicuously bound 
into one. 

The web, then, or the pattern: a web at 
once sensuous and logical, an elegant and 
pregnant texture: that is style, that is the 
foundation of the art of literature. Books in- 
deed continue to be read, for the interest of 
the fa6l or fable, in which this quality is 
poorly represented, but still it will be there. 
And, on the other hand, how many do we 
continue to peruse and reperuse with pleas- 
ure whose only merit is the elegance of tex- 
ture? I am tempted to mention Cicero; and 
since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. 
It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colour- 
less and toothless ''criticism of life"; but we 

187 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and 
dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at 
once of elegance and of good sense ; and the 
two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, 
kept dancing with inimitable grace. 

Up to this moment I have had my eye 
mainly upon prose; for though in verse also 
the implication of the logical texture is a 
crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dis- 
pensed with. You would think that here was 
a death-blow to all I have been saying; and 
far from that, it is but a new illustration of 
the principle involved. For if the versifier is 
not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it 
is because another pattern has been formally 
imposed upon him by the laws of verse. Far 
that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may 
be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; 
it may, like t' e French, depend wholly on 
the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme; 
or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the 
strangely fanciful device of repeating the 
same idea. It does not matter on what prin- 
ciple the law is based, so it be a law. It may 
be pure convention ; it may have no inherent 
beauty ; all that we have a right to ask of any 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern 
for the writer, and that what it lays down 
shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence 
it comes that it is much easier for men of 
equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse 
than reasonably interesting prose; for in 
prose the pattern itself has to be invented, 
and the difficulties first created before they 
can be solved. Hence, again, there follows 
the peculiar greatness of the true versifier: 
such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Vidor 
Hugo, whom 1 place beside them as versifier 
merely, not as poet. These not only knit and 
knot the logical texture of the style with all 
the dexterity and strength of prose ; they not 
only fill up the pattern of the verse with in- 
finite variety and sober wit; but they give 
us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by 
the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, 
with which they follow at the same time, 
and now contrast, and now combine, the 
double pattern of the texture and the verse. 
Here the sounding line concludes; a little 
further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a 
little further, and both will reach their solu- 
tion on the same ringing syllable. The best 

189 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

that can be offered by the best writer of 
prose is to show us the development of the 
idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand 
in hand, sometimes by an obvious and tri- 
umphant effort, sometimes with a great air 
of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by 
virtue of conquering another difficulty, de- 
lights us with a new series of triumphs. He 
follows three purposes where his rival fol- 
lowed only two; and the change is of pre- 
cisely the same nature as that from melody 
to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the 
juggler, behold him now, to the vastly in- 
creased enthusiasm of the spectators, jug- 
gling with three oranges instead of two. 
Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; 
and the pattern, with every fresh element, 
becoming more interesting in itself. 

Yet it must not be thought that verse is 
simply an addition; something is lost as 
well as something gained; and there re- 
mains plainly traceable, in comparing the 
best prose with the best verse, a certain 
broad distinction of method in the web. 
Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of 
logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue 
190 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In 
prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nice- 
ly balanced, and fits into itself with an ob- 
trusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear re- 
marks and is singly gratified by this return 
and balance; while in verse it is all diverted 
to the measure. To find comparable pas- 
sages is hard ; for either the versifier is hugely 
the superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and 
still persist in his more delicate enterprise, 
he fails to be as widely his inferior. But let 
us select them from the pages of the same 
writer, one who was ambidexter; let us 
take, for instance, Rumour's Prologue to the 
Second Part oi Henry IV., a fine flourish of 
eloquence in Shakespeare's second manner, 
and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise 
of sherris, ad: iv. scene i. ; or let us com- 
pare the beautiful prose spoken throughout 
by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for ex- 
ample, the first speech of all, Orlando's 
speech to Adam, with what passage it shall 
please you to seled — the Seven Ages from 
the same play, or even such a stave of no- 
bihty as Othello's farewell to war; and still 
you will be able to perceive, if you have an 

191 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

ear for that class of music, a certain superior 
degree of organisation in the prose; a com- 
pa(5ler fitting of the parts; a balance in the 
swing and the return as of a throbbing pen- 
dulum. We must not, in things temporal, 
take from those who have little, the little 
that they have; the merits of prose are in- 
ferior, but they are not the same; it is a little 
kingdom, but an independent. 

3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way 
back, I used a word which still awaits an 
application. Each phrase, I said, was to be 
comely; but what is a comely phrase ? In all 
ideal and material points, literature, being a 
representative art, must look for analogies 
to painting and the like ; but in what is tech- 
nical and executive, being a temporal art, 
it must seek for them in music. Each phrase 
of each sentence, like an air or a recitative 
in music, should be so artfully compounded 
out of long and short, out of accented and 
unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. 
And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is 
impossible to lay down laws. Even in our 
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis 
can find the secret of the beauty of a verse; 
192 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

how much less, then, of those phrases, such 
as prose is built of, which obey no law but 
to be lawless and yet to please ? The little 
that we know of verse (and for my part 1 
owe it all to my friend Professor Fleeming 
Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting 
in the present connexion. We have been 
accustomed to describe the heroic line as 
five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain 
and confusion whenever, as by the consci- 
entious schoolboy, we have heard our own 
description put in pra(5lice. 

''AH night I the dread | less an | gel un ] pursued,"* 

goes the schoolboy; but though we close 
our ears, we cling to our definition, in spite 
of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. 
Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily 
discovered that the heroic line consists of 
four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, 
contains four pauses: 

"All night I the dreadless j angel [ unpursued." 

Four groups, each pradically uttered as one 
word: the first, in this case, an iamb; the 
second, an amphibrachys; the third, a tro- 
chee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and 

' Milton. 

193 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty but 
that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly 
scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this 
fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this 
fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but 
still kept flying with the others. What had 
seemed to be one thing it now appears is 
two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, 
the verse is made at the same time to read 
in fives and to read in fours. 

But again, four is not necessary. We do 
not, indeed, find verses in six groups, be- 
cause there is not room for six in the ten 
syllables; and we do not find verses of two, 
because one of the main distinctions of verse 
from prose resides in the comparative short- 
ness of the group; but it is even common 
to find verses of three. Five is the one for- 
bidden number; because five is the number 
of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two 
patterns would coincide, and that opposi- 
tion which is the life of verse would instant- 
ly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect 
of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where 
they are so common and make so brave an 
architecture in the verse; for the polysylla- 
194 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

ble is a group of Nature's making. If but 
some Roman would return from Hades 
(Martial, for choice), and tell me by what 
condu(5l of the voice these thundering verses 
should be uttered — '' Aut Lacedcemonium 
Tarentnm/' for a case in point — I feel as 
if I should enter at last into the full enjoy- 
ment of the best of human verses. 

But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or 
supposed to be; by the mere count of syl- 
lables the four groups cannot be all iambic; 
as a question of elegance, I doubt if any one 
of them requires to be so; and I am certain 
that for choice no two of them should scan 
the same. The singular beauty of the verse 
analysed above is due, so far as analysis can 
carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition 
of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scan- 
sion in the groups. The groups which, likethe 
barin music, break upthe verse forutterance, 
fall uniambically; and in declaiming a so- 
callediambic verse, it may so happen that we 
never utter one iambic foot. And yet to this 
negled of the original beat there is a limit. 

'' Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts," ^ 
'Milton. 

195 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic 
line; for though it scarcely can be said to in- 
dicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly sug- 
gests no other measure to the ear. But begin 

'* Mother Athens, eye of Greece," 

or merely '* Mother Athens," and the game 
is up, for the trochaic beat has been sug- 
gested. The eccentric scansion of the groups 
is an adornment; but as soon as the original 
beat hasbeenforgotten, they cease impHcitly 
to be eccentric-. Variety is what is sought; 
' but if we destroy the original mould, one of 
the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall 
back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arith- 
metical measure of the verse, and the degree 
of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of 
prosody to have one common purpose: to 
keep alive the opposition of two schemes 
simultaneously followed; to keep them not- 
ably apart, though still coincident; and to 
balance them with such judicial nicety be- 
fore the reader, that neither shall be unper- 
ceived and neither signally prevail. 

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intri- 
cate. Here, too, we write in groups, or 
phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose 
196 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

phrase is greatly longer and is much more 
nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse ; 
so that not only is there a greater interval of 
continuous sound between the pauses, but, 
for that very reason, word is linked more 
readily to word by a more summary enun- 
ciation. Still, the phrase is the strid analogue 
of the group, and successive phrases, like 
successive groups, must differ openly in 
length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in 
verse is to suggest no measure but the one 
in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at 
all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be 
as much so as you will; but it must not be 
metrical. It may be anything, but it must not 
be verse. A single heroic line may very well 
pass and not disturb the somewhat larger 
stride of the prose style; but one following 
another will produce an instant impression 
of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. 
The same lines delivered with the measured 
utterance of verse would perhaps seem rich 
in variety. By the more summary enunciation 
proper to prose, as to a more distant vision, 
these niceties of difference are lost. A whole 
verse is uttered as one phrase; and the ear is 

197 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

soon wearied by a succession of groups 
identical in length. The prose writer, in fad, 
since he is allowed to be so much less har- 
monious, is condemned to a perpetually 
fresh variety of movement on a larger scale, 
and must never disappoint the ear by the 
trot of an accepted metre. And this obliga- 
tion is the third orange with which he has 
to juggle, the third quality which the prose 
writer must work into his pattern of words. 
It may be thought perhaps that this is a 
quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; 
but such is the inherently rhythmical strain 
of the English language, that the bad writer 
— and must I take for example that admired 
friend of my boyhood. Captain Reid.? — the 
inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his 
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the 
jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, 
all tend to fall at once into the produdion of 
bad blank verse. And here it may be perti- 
nently asked. Why bad? And 1 suppose it 
might be enough to answer that no man ever 
made good verse by accident, and that no 
verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial 
when uttered with the delivery of prose. But 
198 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

we can go beyond such answers. The weak 
side of verse is the regularity of the beat, 
which in itself is decidedly less impressive 
than the movement of the nobler prose ; and it 
is just into this weak side, and this alone, that 
our careless writer falls. A peculiar density 
and mass, consequent on the nearness of the 
pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of 
verse; but this our accidental versifier, still 
following after the swift gait and large ges- 
tures of prose, does not so much as aspire to 
imitate. Lastly, since he remains uncon- 
scious that he is making verse at all, it can 
never occur to him to extrad those effeds of 
counterpoint and opposition which I have 
referred to as the final grace and justification 
of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in 
particular. 

4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a 
great deal of talk about rhythm — and nat- 
urally; for in our canorous language rhythm 
is always at the door. But it must not be 
forgotten that in some languages this ele- 
ment is almost, if not quite, extinft, and 
that in our own it is probably decaying. 
The even speech of many educated Ameri- 

'99 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

cans sounds the note of danger. I should see 
it go with something as bitter as despair, 
but I should not be desperate. As in verse 
no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, 
so, in prose also, other sorts of beauty will 
arise and take the place and play the part of 
those that we outlive. The beauty of the ex- 
pelled beat in verse, the beauty in prose of 
its larger and more lawless melody, patent 
as they are to English hearing, are already 
silent in the ears of our next neighbours; for 
in France the oratorical accent and the pat- 
tern of the web have almost or altogether 
succeeded to their places; and the French 
prose writer would be astounded at the 
labours of his brother across the Channel, 
and how a good quarter of his toil, above 
all invita Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. 
So wonderfully far apart have races wan- 
dered in spirit, and so hard it is to under- 
stand the literature next door! 

Yet French prose is distindly better than 
English; and French verse, above all while 
Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one 
side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase 
or a verse in French is easily distinguishable 

200 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

as comely or uncomely. There is then an- 
other element of comeliness hitherto over- 
looked in this analysis: the contents of the 
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of 
sounds, as each phrase in music consists of 
notes. One sound suggests, echoes, de- 
mands, and harmonises with another; and 
the art of rightly using these concordances 
is the final art in literature. It used to be a 
piece of good advice to all young writers to 
avoid alliteration ; and the advice was sound, 
in so far as it prevented daubing. None the 
less for that, was it abominable nonsense, 
and the mere raving of those blindest of the 
bhnd who will not see. The beauty of the 
contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, de- 
pends implicitly upon alliteration and upon 
assonance. The vowel demands to be re- 
peated; the consonant demands to be re- 
peated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually 
varied. You may follow the adventures of a 
letter through any passage that has particu- 
larly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied 
awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again 
at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass 
into congenerous sounds, one liquid or la- 

20 1 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

bial melting away into another. And you 
will find another and much stranger circum- 
stance. Literature is written by and for two 
senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to per- 
ceive "unheard melodies"; and the eye, 
which direds the pen and deciphers the 
printed phrase. Well, even as there are 
rhymes for the eye, so you will find that 
there are assonances and alliterations; that 
where an author is running the open A, de- 
ceived by the eye and our strange English 
spelling, he will often show a tenderness for 
the flat A; and that where he is running a 
particular consonant, he will not improbably 
rejoice to write it down even when it is 
mute or bears a different value. 

Here, then, we have afresh pattern — a 
pattern, to speak grossly, of letters — which 
makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose 
writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times 
it is very dehcate and hard to perceive, and 
then perhaps most excellent and winning 
(I say perhaps) ; but at times again the ele- 
ments of this literal melody stand more 
boldly forward and usurp the ear. It be- 
comes, therefore, somewhat a matter of 
202 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

conscience to select examples; and as I can- 
not very well ask the reader to help me, I 
shall do the next best by giving him the rea- 
son or the history of each selection. The two 
first, one in prose, one in verse, I chose 
without previous analysis, simply as engag- 
ing passages that had long re-echoed in my 
ear. 

" I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered 
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that 
never sallies out and sees her adversary, but 
slinks out of the race where that immortal 
garland is to be run for, not without dust 
and heat." ' Down to ''virtue," the current 
S and R are both announced and repeated 
unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note 
that almost inseparable group PVF is given 
entire.^ The next phrase is a period of re- 
pose, almost ugly in itself, both S and R 
still audible, and B given as the last fulfil- 

' Milton. 

* As PVF will continue to haunt us through our Eng- 
lish examples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin 
verse, of which it forms a chief adornment, and do not 
hold me answerable for the all too Roman freedom of 
the sense : ' ' Hanc volo, quae facilis, quas palliolata vaga- 
tur." 

203 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

ment of PVF. In the next four phrases, from 
** that never " down to *' run for," the mask 
is thrown off, and, but for a slight repeti- 
tion of the F and V, the whole matter turns, 
almost too obtrusively, on S and R; first S 
coming to the front, and then R. In the con- 
cluding phrase all these favourite letters, and 
even the flat A, a timid preference for which 
is just perceptible, are discarded at a blow 
and in a bundle; and to make the break 
more obvious, every word ends with a den- 
tal, and all but one with T, for which we 
have been cautiously prepared since the be- 
ginning. The singular dignity of the first 
clause, and this hammer-stroke of the last, 
go far to make the charm of this exquisite 
sentence. But it is fair to own that S and R 
are used a Httle coarsely. 

"In Xanadv did Kubla Khan (KANDL) 

A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) 

Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) 

Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) 

Down to a sunless sea. " * (NDLS) 

Here I have put the analysis of the main 
group alongside the lines; and the more it 

^ Coleridge. 
204 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

is looked at, the more interesting it will 
seem. But there are further niceties. In lines 
two and four, the current S is most delicately 
varied with Z. In line three, the current flat 
A is twice varied with the open A, already 
suggested in line two, and both times 
(''where" and ** sacred") in conjundion 
with the current R. In the same line F and 
V (a harmony in themselves, even when 
shorn of their comrade P) are admirably con- 
trasted. And in line four there is a marked 
subsidiary M, which again was announced 
in line two. I stop from weariness, for more 
might yet be said. 

My next example was recently quoted 
from Shakespeare as an example of the 
poet's colour sense. Now, I do not think 
literature has anything to do with colour, 
or poets anyway the better of such a sense; 
and I instantly attacked this passage, since 
''purple " was the word that had so pleased 
the writer of the article, to see if there might 
not be some literary reason for its use. It 
will be seen that I succeeded amply; and I 
am bound to say I think the passage ex- 
ceptional in Shakespeare — exceptional, in- 

205 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

deed, in literature; but it was not I who 
chose it. 

" The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe 
BURNt oN the water : the POOP was BeateN gold, 
PU RPle the sails and so PU R * Fumed that * per 
The wiNds were love-sick with them." * 

It may be asked why I have put the F of 
* * perfumed "in capitals ; and 1 reply, because 
this change from P to F is the completion of 
that from B to P, already so adroitly carried 
out. Indeed, the whole passage is a monu- 
ment of curious ingenuity; and it seems 
scarce worth while to indicate the subsidi- 
ary S, L, and W. In the same article, a sec- 
ond passage from Shakespeare was quoted, 
once again as an example of his colour sense : 

"A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops 
I' the bottom of a cowslip."^ 

It is very curious, very artificial, and not 
worth while to analyse at length : I leave it 
to the reader. But before I turn my back on 
Shakespeare, I should like to quote a pas- 
sage, for my own pleasure, and for a very 
model of every technical art: 

* Antony and Cleopatra. 
^ Cftnbeline. 
206 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

" But in the wind and tempest of her frown, 

W. P. V.^ F. (st) (ow) 
Distindion with a loud and powerful fan, 

W. P. F. (st) (ow) L 
Puffing at all, winnows the light away; 

W. P. F. L 
And what hath mass and matter by itself 

W. F. L. M. A. 
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled, " ^ 

V. L. M. 

From these delicate and choice writers I 
turned with some curiosity to a player of 
the big drum — Macaulay. I had in hand the 
two-volume edition, and I opened at the 
beginning of the second volume. Here was 
what 1 read: 

" The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned 
to the degree of the maladministration which has pro- 
duced them. It is therefore not strange that the govern- 
ment of Scotland, having been during many years greatly 
more corrupt than the government of England, should 
have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement against 
the last king of the house of Stuart was in England con- 
servative, in Scotland destrudive. The English complained 
not of the law, but of the violation of the law." 

This was plain-saihng enough; it was our 

old friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a 

'The Vis in "of" 

* Troilui and Cressida. 

207 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

body; but as I read on, and turned the page, 
and still found PVF with his attendant liq- 
uids, I confess my mind misgave me utter- 
ly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it 
must be the nature of the English tongue. In 
a kind of despair, I turned half-way through 
the volume; and coming upon his lordship 
dealing with General Cannon, and fresh from 
Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here, with 
elucidative spelling, was my reward: 

" Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on 
inKreasing. He Railed a Kouncil of war to Konsider what 
Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the 
Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The 
army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The re- 
cent viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland 
warriors. Great chie/s who had brought siKs or Sez^en hun- 
dred /ighting men into the/ield did not think it /air that 
they should be outtJoted by gentlemen /rom Ireland, and 
fcon\ the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James's 
Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonelsand Kaptains, but 
who were Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains with- 
out Kompanies. " 

A moment of FV in all this world of K's! 
It was not the English language, then, that 
was an instrument of one string, but Macau- 
lay that was an incomparable dauber. 

It was probably from this barbaric love of 
208 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

repeating the same sound, rather than from 
any design of clearness, that he acquired his 
irritating habit of repeating words; I say the 
one rather than the other, because such a 
trick of the ear is deeper-seated and more 
original in man than any logical considera- 
tion. Few writers, indeed, are probably con- 
scious of the length to which they push this 
melody of letters. One, writing very dili- 
gently, and only concerned about the mean- 
ing of his words and the rhythm of his 
phrases, was struck into amazement by the 
eager triumph with which he cancelled one 
expression to substitute another. Neither 
changed the sense; both being monosylla- 
bles, neither could affeft the scansion; and 
it was only by looking back on what he had 
already written that the mystery was solved : 
the second word contained an open A, and 
for nearly half a page he had been riding that 
vowel to the death. 

In pradice, 1 should add, the ear is not al- 
ways so exading; and ordinary writers, in 
ordinary moments, content themselves with 
avoiding what is harsh, and here and there, 
upon a rare occasion, buttressing a phrase, 

209 



ASSAYS AND CRITICISMS 

or linking two together, with a patch of as- 
sonance or a momentary jingle of allitera- 
tion. To understand how constant is this 
preoccupation of good writers, even where 
its results are least obtrusive, it is only nec- 
essary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you 
will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of 
incongruous consonants only relieved by the 
jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not 
to be articulated by the powers of man. 

Conclusion. — We may now briefly enu- 
merate the elements of style. We have, pe- 
culiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping 
his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing 
to the ear, without ever allowing them to 
fall into the stridly metrical: peculiar to the 
versifier, the task of combining and contrast- 
ing his double, treble, and quadruple pat- 
tern, feet and groups, logic and metre — har- 
monious in diversity: common to both, the 
task of artfully combining the prime elements 
of language into phrases that shall be musi- 
cal in the mouth; the task of weaving their 
argument into a texture of committed 
phrases and of rounded periods — but this 
particularly binding in the case of prose : and, 

2IO 



STYLE IN LITER A TURE 

again common to both, th^task gf chooalng 
apt, explicit, and communicative words. 
We begin to see now what an intricate affair 
is any perfect passage; how many faculties, 
whether of taste or pure reason, must be 
held upon the stretch to make it; and why, 
when it is made, it should afford us so com- 
plete a pleasure. From the arrangement of jy" 
according letters, which is altogether ara- 
besque and sensual, up to the architecture of 
the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is 
a vigorous a6t of the pure intelleft, there is 
scarce a faculty in man but has been exer- 
cised. We need not wonder, then, if perfed 
sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. 




211 




Ill 

A NOTE ON REALISM' 

jTYLE is the invariable mark of any 
master; and for the student who 
does not aspire so high as to be 
numbered with the giants, it is still the one 
quality in which he may improve himself at 
will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the 
power of mystery or colour, are allotted in 
the hour of birth, and can be neither learned 
nor simulated. But the just and dexterous 
use of what qualities we have, the propor- 
tion of one part to another and to the whole, 
the elision of the useless, the accentuation 
of the important, and the preservation of a 
uniform character from end to end — these, 
which taken together constitute technical 
perfection, are to some degree within the 
reach of industry and intellectual courage. 
What to put in and what to leave out; 
whether some particular fa6t be organically 

' First published in the Maga:{ine of Art in 1883. 

2 1 3 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

necessary or purely ornamental; whether, 
if it be purely ornamental, it may not weak- 
en or obscure the general design; and final- 
ly, whether, if we decide to use it, we should 
do so grossly and notably, or in some con- 
ventional disguise: are questions of plastic 
style continually rearising. And the sphinx 
that patrols the highways of executive art 
has no more unanswerable riddle to pro- 
pound. 

In literature (from which 1 must draw my 
instances) the great change of the past cen- 
tury has been effected by the admission of 
detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic 
Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic 
Balzac and his more or less wholly unro- 
mantic followers, bound like a duty on the 
novelist. For some time it signified and ex- 
pressed a more ample contemplation of the 
conditions of man's life; but it has recently 
(at least in France) fallen into a merely tech- 
nical and decorative stage, which it is, per- 
haps, still too harsh to call survival. With a 
movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid 
begin to fall a little back from these extrem- 
ities; they begin to aspire after a more 

21; 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

naked, narrative articulation ; after the suc- 
cind, the dignified, and the poetic; and as 
a means to this, after a general lightening of 
this baggage of detail. After Scott we be- 
held the starveling story — once, in the 
hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable 
— begin to be pampered upon fads. The in- 
trodudion of these details developed a par- 
ticular ability of hand ; and that ability, child- 
ishly indulged, has led to the works that 
now amaze us on a railway journey. A man 
of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends 
himself on technical successes. To afford a 
popular flavour and attrad the mob, he adds 
a steady current of what 1 may be allowed 
to call the rancid. That is exciting to the 
moralist; but what more particularly inter- 
ests the artist is this tendency of the ex- 
treme of detail, when followed as a princi- 
ple, to degenerate into mere feux-de-j'ote of 
literary tricking. The other day even M. 
Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible 
colours and visible sounds. 

This odd suicide of one branch of the 
realists may serve to remind us of the faft 
which underlies a very dusty conflict of the 
214 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

critics. All representative art, which can be 
said to live, is both realistic and ideal; and 
the realism about which we quarrel is a mat- 
ter purely of externals. It is no especial cul- 
tus of nature and veracity, but a mere whim 
of veering fashion, that has made us turn 
our back upon the larger, more various, and 
more romantic art of yore. A photographic 
exaditude in dialogue is now the exclusive 
fashion ; but even in the ablest hands it tells 
us no more — I think it even tells us less — 
than Moliere, wielding his artificial medium, 
has told to us and to all time of Alceste or 
Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical 
novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions 
of man's nature and the conditions of man's 
life, the truth of literary art, is free of the 
ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, 
in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The 
scene may be pitched in London, on the 
sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the moun- 
tains of Beulah. And by an odd and lumi- 
nous accident, if there is any page of litera- 
ture calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, 
it must be that Troilus and Cressida which 
Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger 

215 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

with the world, grafted on the heroic story 
of the siege of Troy. 

This question of reahsm, let it then be 
clearly understood, regards not in the least 
degree the fundamental truth, but only the 
technical method, of a work of art. Be as 
ideal or as abstra6l as you please, you will 
be none the less veracious; but if you be 
weak, you run the risk of being tedious and 
inexpressive; and if you be very strong and 
honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. 

A work of art is first cloudily conceived 
in the mind; during the period of gestation 
it stands more clearly forward from these 
swaddling mists, puts on expressive linea- 
ments, and becomes at length that most 
faultless, but also, alas! that incommunica- 
ble produd of the human mind, a perfefted 
design. On the approach to execution all is 
changed. The artist must now step down, 
don his working clothes, and become the 
artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy 
conception, his dehcate Ariel, to the touch 
of matter; he must decide, almost in a 
breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the 
particularity of execution of his whole design. 
216 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

The engendering idea of some works is 
stylistic; a technical preoccupation stands 
them instead of some robuster principle of 
life. And with these the execution is but 
play; for the styhstic problem is resolved 
beforehand, and all large originality of treat- 
ment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, 
intricately designed, which we have learnt 
to admire, with a certain smiling admira- 
tion, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dob- 
son; such, too, are those canvases where 
dexterity or even breadth of plastic style 
takes the place of piftorial nobility of de- 
sign. So, it may be remarked, it was easier 
to begin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, 
since, in the first, the style was dictated by 
the nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a 
man probably of some indolence of mind, 
enjoyed and got good profit of this economy 
of effort. But the case is exceptional. Usual- 
ly in all works of art that have been con- 
ceived from within outwards, and gener- 
ously nourished from the author's mind, the 
moment in which he begins to execute is 
one of extreme perplexity and strain. Art- 
ists of indifferent energy and an imperfe(5l 

217 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

devotion to their own ideal make this un- 
grateful effort once for all; and, having 
formed a style, adhere to it through life. But 
those of a higher order cannot rest content 
with a process which, as they continue to 
employ it, must infallibly degenerate to- 
wards the academic and the cut-and-dried. 
Every fresh work in which they embark is 
the signal for a fresh engagement of the 
whole forces of their mind; and the chang- 
ing views which accompany the growth of 
their experience are marked by still more 
sweeping alterations in the manner of their 
art. So that criticism loves to dwell upon 
and distinguish the varying periods of a 
Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 

It is, then, first of all, at this initial and 
decisive moment when execution is begun, 
and thenceforth only in a less degree, that 
the ideal and the real do indeed, like good 
and evil angels, contend for the direction of 
the work. Marble, paint, and language, the 
pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their 
grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their 
hours, if I may so express myself, of insub- 
ordination. It is the work and it is a great 
218 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

part of the delight of any artist to contend 
with these unruly tools, and now by brute 
energy, now by witty expedient, to drive 
and coax them to effect his will. Given these 
means, so laughably inadequate, and given 
the interest, the intensity, and the multi- 
plicity of the adual sensation whose effe(5l 
he is to render with their aid, the artist has 
one main and necessary resource which he 
must, in every case and upon any theory, 
employ. He must, that is, suppress much 
and omit more. He must omit what is tedi- 
ous or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedi- 
ous and necessary. But such fads as, in re- 
gard to the main design, subserve a variety 
of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly re- 
tain. And it is the mark of the very highest 
order of creative art to be woven exclusively 
of such. There, any fad that is registered is 
contrived a double or a treble debt to pay, 
and is at once an ornament in its place, and 
a pillar in the main design. Nothing would 
find room in such a pi6ture that did not 
serve, at once, to complete the composition, 
to accentuate the scheme of colour, to dis- 
tinguish the planes of distance, and to strike 

219 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the note of the seleded sentiment; nothing 
would be allowed in such a story that did 
not, at the same time, expedite the progress 
of the fable, build up the charadlers, and 
strike home the moral or the philosophical 
design. But this is unattainable. As a rule, 
so far from building the fabric of our works 
exclusively with these, we are thrown into 
a rapture if we think we can muster a 
dozen or a score of them, to be the plums 
of our confedion. And hence, in order that 
the canvas may be filled or the story pro- 
ceed from point to point, other details must 
be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! 
upon a doubtful title; many without mar- 
riage robes. Thus any work of art, as it pro- 
ceeds towards completion, too often — I had 
almost written always — loses in force and 
poignancy of main design. Our little air is 
swamped and dwarfed among hardly rele- 
vant orchestration; our little passionate 
story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive 
eloquence or slipshod talk. 

But again, we are rather more tempted to 
admit those particulars which we know we 
can describe; and hence those most of all 
220 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

which, having been described very often, 
have grown to be conventionally treated in 
the practice of our art. These we choose, as 
the mason chooses the acanthus to adorn his 
capital, because they come naturally to the 
accustomed hand. The old stock incidents 
and accessories, tricks of workmanship and 
schemes of composition (all being admirably 
good, or they would long have been forgot- 
ten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us 
ready-made but not perfedly appropriate 
solutions for any problem that arises, and 
wean us from the study of nature and the 
uncompromising pradice of art. To strug- 
gle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, 
and give expression to fads which have not 
yet been adequately or not yet elegantly ex- 
pressed, is to run a little upon the danger of 
extreme self-love. Difficulty sets a high price 
upon achievement; and the artist may easily 
fall into the error of the French naturalists, 
and consider any fa(5l as welcome to admis- 
sion if it be the ground of brilliant handi- 
work ; or, again, into the error of the modern 
landscape-painter, who is apt to think that 
difficulty overcome and science well dis- 

221 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

played can take the place of what is, after all, 
the one excuse and breath of art — charm. A 
little further, and he will regard charm in the 
light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, 
and the omission of a tedious passage as an 
infidelity to art. 

We have now the matter of this difference 
before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed 
upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill 
up the interval with detail of the conven- 
tional order, briefly touched, soberly sup- 
pressed in tone, courting negled. But the 
realist, with a fine intemperance, will not 
suffer the presence of anything so dead as a 
convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot- 
pressed from nature, all charadered and 
notable, seizing the eye. The style that be- 
fits either of these extremes, once chosen, 
brings with it its necessary disabilities and 
dangers. The immediate danger of the reahst 
is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of 
the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane 
pursuit of completion, to immolate his read- 
ers under fafts; but he comes in the last re- 
sort, and as his energy declines, to discard 
all design, abjure all choice, and, with scien- 

222 



A NOTE ON REALISM 

tific thoroughness, steadily to communicate 
matter which is not worth learning. The 
danger of the idealist is, of course, to become 
merely null and lose all grip of fad, particu- 
larity, or passion. 

We talk of bad and good. Everything, in- 
deed, is good which is conceived with hon- 
esty and executed with communicative ar- 
dour. But though on neither side is dogma- 
tism fitting, and though in every case the 
artist must decide for himself, and decide 
afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding 
work and new creation; yet one thing may 
be generally said, that we of the last quarter 
of the nineteenth century, breathing as we 
do the intelledual atmosphere of our age, 
are more apt to err upon the side of realism 
than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that 
theory it may be well to watch and correal 
our own decisions, always holding back the 
hand from the least appearance of irrelevant 
dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin no 
work that is not philosophical, passionate, 
dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last 
and least, romantic in design. 



223 




IV 

BOOKS WHICH HAVE 
INFLUENCED ME' 

'HE Editor^ has somewhat insid- 
iously laid a trap for his correspond- 
ents, the question put appearing at 
first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is 
not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance 
and review that the writer awakes to find 
himself engaged upon something in the na- 
ture of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, 
upon a chapter in the life of that little, beau- 
tiful brother whom we once all had, and 
whom we have all lost and mourned, the 
man we ought to have been, the man we 
hoped to be. But when word has been passed 
(even to an editor), it should, if possible, be 
kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say 
too little, and sometimes weak and say too 
much, the blame must lie at the door of the 
person who entrapped me. 

* First published in the British IVeehly, May 13, 1887. 
^ Of the British IVeekly. 
224 



THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

The most influential books, and the truest 
in their influence, are works offidion. They 
do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he 
must afterwards discover to be inexad ; they 
do not teach him a lesson, which he must 
afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rear- 
range, they clarify the lessons of life; they 
disengage us from ourselves, they constrain 
us to the acquaintance of others; and they 
show us the web of experience, not as we 
can see it for ourselves, but with a singular 
change — that monstrous, consuming ego oi 
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be 
so, they must be reasonably true to the hu- 
man comedy ; and any work that is so serves 
the turn of instruftion. But the course of our 
education is answered best by those poems 
and romances where we breathe a magnan- 
imous atmosphere of thought and meet gen- 
erous and pious characters. Shakespeare has 
served me best. Few living friends have had 
upon me an influence so strong for good as 
Hamlet or Rosalind. The last charader, al- 
ready well beloved in the reading, I had the 
good fortune to see, 1 must think, in an im- 
pressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Sid- 

225 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

dons. Nothing has ever more moved, more 
delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the 
influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
speech over the dying Lear had a great effect 
upon my mind, and was the burthen of my 
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touch- 
ingly generous did it appear in sense, so 
overpowering in expression. Perhaps my 
dearest and best friend outside of Shake- 
speare is D'Artagnan — the elderly D'Artag- 
nanof the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I know not 
a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer ; I 
shall be very sorry for the man who is so 
much of a pedant in morals that he cannot 
learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, 
I must name the Pilgrim's Progress, a book 
that breathes of every beautiful and valuable 
emotion. 

But of works of art little can be said ; their 
influence is profound and silent, like the in- 
fluence of nature; they mould by contact; 
we drink them up like water, and are bet- 
tered, yet know not how. It is in books more 
specifically didadic that we can follow out 
the effe(5t, and distinguish and weigh and 
compare. A book which has been very influ- 
226 



THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

ential upon me fell early into my hands, and 
so may stand first, though 1 think its influ- 
ence was only sensible later on, and perhaps 
still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily 
outlived : the Essais of Montaigne. That tem- 
perate and genial picture of life is a great gift 
to place in the hands of persons of to-day; 
they will find in these smiling pages a maga- 
zine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique 
strain; they will have their ''linen decen- 
cies" and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and 
will (if they have any gift of reading) per- 
ceive that these have not been fluttered with- 
out some excuse and ground of reason ; and 
(again if they have any gift of reading) they 
will end by seeing that this old gentleman 
was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held 
in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than 
they or their contemporaries. 

The next book, in order of time, to influ- 
ence me, was the New Testament, and in 
particular the Gospel according to St. Mat- 
thew. I believe it would startle and move 
any one if they could make a certain effort of 
imagination and read it freshly like a book, 
not droningly and dully like a portion of the 

227 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

Bible. Any one would then be able to see in 
it those truths which we are all courteously 
supposed to know and all modestly refrain 
from applying. But upon this subjed it is 
perhaps better to be silent. 

I come next to Whitman's Leaves of 
Grass, a book of singular service, a book 
which tumbled the world upside down for 
me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs 
of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having 
thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me 
back again upon a strong foundation of all 
the original and manly virtues. But it is, 
once more, only a book for those who have 
the gift of reading. I will be very frank — I 
beheve it is so with all good books except, 
perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and 
must live, so wholly in convention, that 
gunpowder charges of the truth are more 
apt to discompose than to invigorate his 
creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy 
and indecency, and crouches the closer 
round that little idol of part-truths and part- 
conveniences which is the contemporary 
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
forgets what is old, and becomes truly blas- 
228 



THE I NFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

phemous and indecent himself. New truth is 
only useful to supplement the old ; rough 
truth is only wanted to expand, not to de- 
stroy, our civil and often elegant conven- 
tions. He who cannot judge had better stick 
to fidion and the daily papers. There he will 
get little harm, and, in the first at least, some 
good. 

Close upon the back of my discovery of 
Whitman, 1 came under the influence of 
Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi 
exists, and few better. How much of his vast 
strudure will bear the touch of time, how 
much is clay and how much brass, it were 
too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, 
are always manly and honest; there dwells 
in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, 
plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but 
still joyful; and the reader will find there a 
caput mortiium of piety, with little indeed of 
its loveliness, but with most of its essentials ; 
and these two qualities make him a whole- 
some, as his intelledual vigour makes him a 
bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound 
if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great im- 

229 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

portance for me when it first fell into my 
hands — a strange instance of the partiality 
of man's good and man's evil. I know no 
one whom I less admire than Goethe; he 
seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, 
breaking open the doors of private life, and 
wantonly wounding friends, in that crown- 
ing offence of Werther, and in his own char- 
after a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, con- 
scious of the rights and duties of superior 
talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious 
of the rights and duties of his office. And yet 
in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest 
and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what 
lessons are contained! Biography, usually 
so false to its office, does here for once per- 
form for us some of the work of fi6tion, re- 
minding us, that is, of the truly mingled tis- 
sue of man's nature, and how huge faults 
and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in 
the same character. History serves us well 
to this eflfeft, but in the originals, not in the 
pages of the popular epitomiser, who is 
bound, by the very nature of his task, to 
make us feel the difference of epochs instead 
of the essential identity of man, and even in 
230 



THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

the originals only to those who can recog- 
nise their own human virtues and defeds in 
strange forms, often inverted and under 
strange names, often interchanged. Martial 
is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a 
man new thoughts to read his works dispas- 
sionately, and find in this unseemly jester's 
serious passages the image of a kind, wise, 
and self-respefting gentleman. It is custom- 
ary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave 
out these pleasant verses; I never heard of 
them, at least, until 1 found them for myself; 
and this partiality is one among a thousand 
things that help to build up our distorted 
and hysterical conception of the great Ro- 
man Empire. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a 
very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus 
Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the 
noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of 
others, that are there expressed and were 
praftised on so great a scale in the life of its 
writer, make this book a book quite by it- 
self. No one can read it and not be moved. 
Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feel- 
ings — those very mobile, those not very 

23! 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

trusty parts of man. Its address lies further 
back: its lesson comes more deeply home; 
when you have read, you carry away with 
you a memory of the man himself; it is as 
though you had touched a loyal hand, looked 
into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; 
there is another bond on you thenceforward, 
binding you to life and to the love of virtue. 
Wordsworth should perhaps come next. 
Every one has been influenced by Words- 
worth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A 
certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, 
a sight of the stars, *'the silence that is in the 
lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of 
dawn, cHng to his work and give it a partic- 
ular address to what is best in us. I do not 
know that you learn a lesson; you need not 
— Mill did not — agree with any one of his 
beliefs ; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the 
best teachers : a dogma learned is only a new 
error — the old one was perhaps as good; 
but a spirit communicated is a perpetual 
possession. These best teachers climb be- 
yond teaching to the plane of art; it is them- 
selves, and what is best in themselves, that 
they communicate. 

2^2 



THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

I should never forgive myself if I forgot 
The Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it be- 
longs purely to didadic art, and from all the 
novels I have read (and I have read thou- 
sands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a 
Nathan for the modern David; here is a book 
to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the 
angry pidure of human faults, is not great 
art ; we can all be angry with our neighbour ; 
what we want is to be shown, not his de- 
fers, of which we are too conscious, but his 
merits, to which we are too blind. And The 
Egoist is a satire; so much must be allowed ; 
but it is a satire of a singular quality, which 
tells you nothing of that obvious mote, 
which is engaged from first to last with that 
invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted 
down; these are your own faults that are 
dragged into the day and numbered, with 
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- 
cision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as 
I have the story) came to him in an agony. 
''This is too bad of you," he cried. ** Will- 
oughbyisme!" "No, my dear fellow," said 
the author; " he is all of us." I have read The 
Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

read it again; for I am like the young friend 
of the anecdote — I think Willoughby an un- 
manly but a very serviceable exposure of 
myself. 

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find 
that I have forgotten much that was most 
influential, as I see already I have forgotten 
Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the 
Spirit of Obligations " was a turning-point in 
my life, and Penn, whose little book of 
aphorisms had a brief but strong eflfe6l on 
me, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, 
wherein 1 learned forthe first time the proper 
attitude of any rational man to his country's 
laws — a secret found, and kept, in the Asi- 
atic islands. That I should commemorate all 
is more than 1 can hope or the Editor could 
ask. It will be more to the point, after having 
said so much upon improving books, to say 
a word or two about the improvable reader. 
The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not 
very common, nor very generally under- 
stood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intel- 
lectual endowment — a free grace, I find I 
must call it — by which a man rises to under- 
stand that he is not pundually right, nor 
234 



THE INFL UENCE OF BOOKS 

those from whom he differs absolutely 
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold 
them passionately; and he may know that 
others hold them but coldly, or hold them 
differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if 
he has the gift of reading, these others will 
be full of meat for him. They will see the 
other side of propositions and the other side 
of virtues. He need not change his dogma 
for that, but he may change his reading of 
that dogma, and he must supplement and 
corred his dedudions from it. A human 
truth, which is always very much a lie, hides 
as much of hfe as it displays. It is men who 
hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, 
perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend 
our restrided field of knowledge, and rouse 
our drowsy consciences. Something that 
seems quite new, or that seems insolently 
false or very dangerous, is the test of a 
reader. If he tries to see what it means, what 
truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him 
read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or ex- 
claims upon his author's folly, he had better 
take to the daily papers; he will never be a 
reader. 

235 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

And here, with the aptest illustrative 
force, after I have laid down my part-truth, 
I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, 
we are vessels of a very limited content. Not 
all men can read all books; it is only in a 
chosen few that any man will find his ap- 
pointed food ; and the fittest lessons are the 
most palatable, and make themselves wel- 
come to the mind. A writer learns this early, 
and it is his chief support; he goes on un- 
afraid, laying down the law; and he is sure 
at heart that most of what he says is demon- 
strably false, and much of a mingled strain, 
and some hurtful, and very little good for 
service; but he is sure besides that when his 
words fall into the hands of any genuine 
reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, 
and only that which suits will be assimi- 
lated; and when they fall into the hands of 
one who cannot intelligently read, they 
come there quite silent and inarticulate, fall- 
ing upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as 
if he had not written. 



236 



SWISS NOTES 




HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 

JHERE has come a change in medi- 
cal opinion, and a change has fol- 
lowed in the lives of sick folk. A 
year or two ago and the wounded soldiery 
of mankind were all shut up together in 
some basking angle of the Riviera, walking 
a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive 
yards within earshot of the interminable 
and unchanging surf — idle among spirit- 
less idlers; not perhaps dying, yet hardly 
living either, and aspiring, sometimes 
fiercely, after livelier weather and some 
vivifying change. These were certainly 
beautiful places to live in, and the climate 
was wooing in its softness. Yet there was 
a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not 
certain whether you were being wooed; 
and these mild shores would sometimes 
seem to you to be the shores of death. There 
was a lack of a manly element; the air was 

239 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

not readive; you might write bits of poetry 
and pradise resignation, but you did not 
feel that here was a good spot to repair your 
tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, 
after all, that there was something just in 
these appreciations. The invalid is now 
asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air 
shall medicine him ; the demon of cold is no 
longer to be fled from, but bearded in his 
den. For even Winter has his ''dear domes- 
tic cave ," and in those places where he may 
be said to dwell for ever tempers his aus- 
terities. 

Any one who has travelled westward by 
the great transcontinental railroad of Amer- 
ica must remember the joy with which 
he perceived, after the tedious prairies of 
Nebraska and across the vast and dismal 
moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy 
mountain summits along the southern sky. 
It is among these mountains in the new 
State of Colorado, that the sick man 
may find, not merely an alleviation of his 
ailments, but the possibility of an adive 
life and an honest livelihood. There, no 
longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a 
240 



HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 

working farmer, sweating at his work, he 
may prolong and begin anew his life. In- 
stead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead 
of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the 
forest, and the pure, rare air of the open 
mountains for the miasma of the sick room 
— these are the changes offered him, with 
what promise of pleasure and of self-resped^ 
with what a revolution in all his hopes and 
terrors, none but an invalid can know. Res- 
ignation, the cowardice that apes a kind 
of courage and that lives in the very air of 
health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of 
such a prospe6t. The man can open the 
door; he can be up and doing; he can be a 
kind of a man after all and not merely an 
invalid. 

But it is a far cry to the Rocky Moun- 
tains. We cannot all of us go farming in 
Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, 
which combines the medical benefits of the 
new system with the moral drawbacks of 
the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside 
from life and its wholesome duties; again 
he has to be an idler among idlers; but this 
time at a great altitude, far among the 

241 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

mountains, with the snow piled before his 
door and the frost flowers every morning on 
his window. The mere fa6t is tonic to his 
nerves. His choice of a place of wintering 
has somehow to his own eyes the air of an 
a6t of bold contraft; and, since he has wil- 
fully sought low temperatures, he is not so 
apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came 
for that, he looked for it, and he throws it 
from him with the thought. 

A long straight reach of valley, wall-like 
mountains upon either hand that rise higher 
and higher and shoot up new summits the 
higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen 
even from the valley; a village of hotels; a 
world of black and white — black pine- 
woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, 
and white snow flouring it, and papering it 
between the pinewoods, and covering all 
the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a 
few score invalids marching to and fro upon 
the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks, 
possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades 
by the door of the hotel — and you have the 
larger features of a mountain sanatorium. 
A certain furious river runs curving down 
242 



HEAL TH AND MO UN TAINS 

the valley; its pace never varies, it has not a 
pool for as far as you can follow it; and its 
unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely 
tedious to witness. It is a river that a man 
could grow to hate. Day after day breaks 
with the rarest gold upon the mountain 
spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, 
down into the valley. From end to end the 
snow reverberates the sunshine ; from end to 
end the air tingles with the light, clear and 
dry like crystal. Only along the course of the 
river, but high above it, there hangs far into 
the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It 
were hard to fancy a more engaging feature 
in a landscape ; perhaps it is harder to believe 
that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the 
atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent 
stream whose course it follows. By noon 
the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of 
colour — mild and pale and melting in the 
north, but towards the zenith, dark with an 
intensity of purple blue. What with this 
darkness of heaven and the intolerable lus- 
tre of the snow, space is reduced again to 
chaos. An English painter, coming to France 
late in life, declared with natural anger that 

243 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

"the values were all wrong." Had he got 
among the Alps on a bright day he might 
have lost his reason. And even to any one 
who has looked at landscape with any care, 
and in any way through the spectacles of 
representative art, the scene has a charadler 
of insanity. The distant shining mountain 
peak is here beside your eye ; the neighbour- 
ing dull coloured housein comparison is miles 
away; the summit, which is all of splendid 
snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, 
which are black with pine trees, bear it no 
relation, and might be in another sphere. 
Here there are none of those delicate grada- 
tions, those intimate, misty joinings-on and 
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing 
of that art of air and light by which the face 
of nature explains and veils itself in climes 
which we may be allowed to think more 
lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where 
everything that is not white is a solecism 
and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a 
scene of blinding definition; a parade of 
daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more 
than scenically trying, and yet hearty and 
healthy, making the nerves to tighten and 
244 



HEAL TH AND MO UN TAINS 

the mouth to smile: such is the winter day- 
time in the Alps. With the approach of even- 
ing all is changed. A mountain will sudden- 
ly intercept the sun ; a shadow fall upon the 
valley; in ten minutes the thermometer will 
drop as many degrees; the peaks that are 
no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; 
and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be 
rightly characteristic of the place, the sky 
fades toward night through a surprising key 
of colours. The latest gold leaps from the 
last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon 
shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley 
shall be mellowed and misted, and here and 
there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, 
and here and there a warmly glowing win- 
dow in a house, between fire and starlight, 
kind and homely in the fields of snow. 

But the valley is not seated so high among 
the clouds to be eternally exempt from 
changes. The clouds gather, black as ink; 
the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the 
mists drive overhead, the snow-flakes flut- 
ter down in blinding disarray ; daily the mail 
comes in later from the top of the pass ; peo- 
ple peer through their windows and foresee 

24,^ 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, 
and death by gradual dry-rot, each in his 
indifferent inn; and when at last the storm 
goes, and the sun comes again, behold a 
world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, 
bright like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs 
and cheerful to the souls of men. Or per- 
haps from across storied and malarious Italy, 
a wind cunningly winds about the moun- 
tains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon 
our mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; 
the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load 
of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; 
and the whole invalid world huddles into 
its private chambers, and silently recognises 
the empire of the Fohn. 




246 




II 

DAVOS IN WINTER 

MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, 
a certain prison-like effeft on the 
imagination, but a mountain valley, 
an Alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness 
make up among them a prison of the most 
eflfedive kind. The roads indeed are cleared, 
and at least one footpath dodging up the 
hill; but to these the health seeker is rigidly 
confined. There are for him no cross cuts 
over the field, no following of streams, no 
unguided rambles in the wood. His walks 
are cut and dry. In five or six different di- 
re6tions he can push as far, and no farther, 
than his strength permits; never deviating 
from the line laid down for him and behold- 
ing at each repetition the same field of 
wood and snow from the same corner of the 
road. This, of itself, would be a little trying 
to the patience in the course of months ; but 
to this is added, by the heaped mantle of 

247 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the snow, an almost utter absence of detail 
and an almost unbroken identity of colour. 
Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The 
sun touches it with roseate and golden 
lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, 
its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, 
when regarded near at hand, with wonder- 
ful depths of coloured shadow, and, though 
wintrily transformed, it is still water, and 
has watery tones of blue. But, when all is 
said, these fields of white and blots of crude 
black forest are but a trite and staring sub- 
stitute for the infinite variety and pleasant- 
ness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, 
whose front is too precipitous to have re- 
tained the snow, seems, if you come upon 
it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, re- 
minds you almost painfully of other places, 
and brings into your head the delights of 
more Arcadian days — the path across the 
meadow, the hazel dell, the Hlies on the 
stream, and the scents, the colours, and 
the whisper of the woods. And scents here 
are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust 
of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall 
smell nothing all day long but the faint and 
248 



DA VOS IN WINTER 

choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are 
absent : not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, 
in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh 
goes by, the sleigh bells ring, and that is all; 
you work all winter through to no other ac- 
companiment but the crunching of your 
steps upon the frozen snow. 

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be 
each one village from one end to the other. 
Go where you please, houses will still be in 
sight, before and behind you, and to the 
right and left. Climb as high as an invalid is 
able, and it is only to spy new habitations 
nested in the wood. Nor is that all ; for about 
the health resort the walks are besieged by 
single people walking rapidly with plaids 
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of 
German boys trying to learn to jodel, and 
by German couples silently and, as you 
venture to fancy, not quite happily pursu- 
ing love's young dream. You may perhaps 
be an invalid who likes to make bad verses 
as he walks about. Alas! no muse will suf- 
fer this imminence of interruption — and at 
the second stampede of jodellers you find 

your modest inspiration fled. Or you may 

249 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

only have a taste for solitude; it may try 
your nerves to have some one always in 
front whom you are visibly overtaking, and 
some one always behind who is audibly 
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score 
or so who brush past you in an opposite 
diredion. It may annoy you to take your 
walks and seats in public view. Alas! there 
is no help for it among the Alps. There are 
no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil- 
mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on 
the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint 
Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of 
breakers, and fragrant with the threefold 
sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-pines 
and the sea. 

For this publicity there is no cure, and no 
alleviation; but the storms of which you 
will complain so bitterly while they endure, 
chequer and by their contrast brighten the 
sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When 
sun and storm contend together — when the 
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by 
arrows of golden daylight — there will be 
startling rearrangements and transfigura- 
tions of the mountain summits. A sun-daz- 
250 



DA VOS IN WINTER 

zling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid- 
sky among awful glooms and blackness; or 
perhaps the edge of some great mountain 
shoulder will be designed in living gold, and 
appear for the duration of a glance bright like 
a constellation, and alone 'Mn the unappar- 
ent." You may think you know the figure 
of these hills; but when they are thus re- 
vealed, they belong no longer to the things 
of earth — meteors we should rather call 
them, appearances of sun and air that en- 
dure but for a moment and return no more. 
Other variations are more lasting, as when, 
for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen 
through some windless hours, and the thin, 
spiry, mountain pine trees stand each stock- 
still and loaded with a shining burthen. You 
may drive through a forest so disguised, 
the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently 
in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except 
the jingle of the sleigh bells and you shall 
fancy yourself in some untrodden northern 
territory — Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska. 

Or, possibly, you arise very early in the 
morning; totter down stairs in a state of 
somnambuhsm; take the simulacrum of a 

251 



ESSA YS AND CRITICISMS 

meal by the glimmer of one lamp in the de- 
serted coffee-room; and find yourself by 
seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight 
and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes you 
up and carries you on, and you reach the top 
of the ascent in the first hour of the day. To 
trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass 
from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree- 
tops stand out soberly against the lighted 
sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonder- 
land of clear, fading shadows, disappearing 
vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half 
glorified already with the day and still half 
confounded with the greyness of the west- 
ern heaven — these will seem to repay you 
for the discomforts of that early start; but 
as the hour proceeds, and these enchant- 
ments vanish, you will find yourself upon 
the further side in yet another Alpine valley, 
snow white and coal black, with such an- 
other long-drawn congeries of hamlets and 
such another senseless watercourse bicker- 
ing along the foot. You have had your mo- 
ment; but you have not changed the scene. 
The mountains are about you like a trap; 
you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold 
252 



DA VOS IN WINTER 

the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and 
corners, and can change only one for an- 
other. 




253 




Ill 

ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

'HERE will be no lack of diversion 
in an Alpine sanitarium. The place 
is half English to be sure, the local 
sheet appearing in double column, text and 
translation; but it still remains half German; 
and hence we have a band which is able to 
play, and a company of adors able, as you 
will be told, to aft. This last you will take 
on trust, for the players, unlike the local 
sheet, confine themselves to German; and 
though at the beginning of winter they 
come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in 
turn, long before Christmas they will have 
given up the English for a bad job. There 
will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between 
the two races ; the German element seeking, 
in the interest of their aftors, to raise a 
mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which fig- 
ures heavily enough already in the weekly 
bills, the English element stoutly resisting. 

254 



ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

Meantime in the English hotels home- 
piayed farces, tableaux-vivants, and even 
balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar 
sheds genial consternation; Christmas and 
New Year are solemnized with Pantagrue- 
lian dinners, and from time to time the 
young folks carol and revolve untunefully 
enough through the figures of a singing 
quadrille. A magazine club supplies you 
with everything, from the Qiiarterly to the 
Sunday at Home. Grand tournaments are 
organized at chess, draughts, billiards and 
whist. Once and again wandering artists 
drop into our mountain valley, coming you 
know not whence, going you cannot imag- 
ine whither, and belonging to every degree 
in the hierarchy of musical art, from the 
recognized performer who announces a con- 
cert for the evening, to the comic German 
family or solitary long-haired German bar- 
itone who surprises the guests at dinner- 
time with songs and a collection. They are 
all of them good to see; they, at least, are 
moving; they bring with them the senti- 
ment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, 
they were in Tyrol, and next week they 

255 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick 
folk still simmer in our mountain prison. 
Some of them, too, are welcome as the 
flowers in May for their own sake; some 
of them may have a human voice; some 
may have that magic which transforms a 
wooden box into a song-bird, and what we 
jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention 
with respe6l as a violin. From that grinding 
lilt, with which the blind man, seeking 
pence, accompanies the beat of paddle 
wheels across the ferry, there is surely a 
difference rather of kind than of degree to 
that unearthly voice of singing that bewails 
and praises the destiny of man at the touch 
of the true virtuoso. Even that you may 
perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you will 
own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly 
than here, im Schnee der Alpen. A hya- 
cinth in a pot, a handful of primroses 
packed in moss, or a piece of music by some 
one who knows the way to the heart of a 
violin, are things that, in this invariable 
sameness of the snows and frosty air, sur- 
prise you Jike an adventure. It is droll, more- 
over, to compare the respe6lwith which the 
256 



ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

invalids attend a concert, and the ready con- 
tempt with which they greet the dinner- 
time performers. Singing which they would 
hear with real enthusiasm — possibly with 
tears — from a corner of a drawing-room, 
is listened to with laughter when it is of- 
fered by an unknown professional and no 
money has been taken at the door. 

Of skating little need be said ; in so snowy 
a climate the rinks must be intelligently 
managed; their mismanagement will lead 
to many days of vexation and some petty 
quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is 
certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, 
for the invalid to skate under a burning 
sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, 
through long trads of glare and passages of 
freezing shadow. But the peculiar outdoor 
sport of this distrid is tobogganing. A 
Scotchman may remember the low flat 
board, with the front wheels on a pivot, 
which was called a hurlie ; he may re- 
member this contrivance, laden with boys, 
as, laboriously started, it ran rattling down 
the brae, and was, now successfully, now 
unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at 

257 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

the foot; he may remember scented summer 
evenings passed in this diversion, and many 
a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neg- 
leded lesson. The toboggan is to the hurlie 
what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hur- 
lie upon runners ; and if for a grating road 
you substitute a long declivity of beaten 
snow you can imagine the giddy career of 
the tobogganist. The correct position is to 
sit ; but the fantastic will sometimes sit hind- 
foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly 
or their back. A few steer with a pair of 
pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use 
the feet. If the weight be heavy and the track 
smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between 
its teeth ; and to steer a couple of full-sized 
friends in safety requires not only judgment 
but desperate exertion. On a very steep 
track, with a keen evening frost, you may 
have moments almost too appalling to be 
called enjoyment; the head goes, the world 
vanishes; your blind steed bounds below 
your weight; you reach the foot, with all 
the breath knocked out of your body, jarred 
and bewildered as though you had just been 
subjeded to a railway accident. Another 
258 



ALPINE DIVERSIONS 

element of joyful horror is added by the for- 
mation of a train; one toboggan being tied 
to another, perhaps to the number of half a 
dozen, only the first rider being allowed to 
steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their 
feet and follow their leader, with heart in 
mouth, down the mad descent. This, par- 
ticularly if the track begins with a headlong 
plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies 
in the world, and the tobogganing invalid 
is early reconciled to somersaults. 

There is all manner of variety in the na- 
ture of the tracks, some miles in length, 
others but a few yards, and yet like some 
short rivers, furious in their brevity. All de- 
grees of skill and courage and taste may be 
suited in your neighborhood. But perhaps 
the true way to toboggan is alone and at 
night. First comes the tedious climb, drag- 
ging your instrument behind you. Next a 
long breathing space, alone with snow and 
pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the 
heart. Then you push off; the toboggan 
fetches way; she begins to feel the hill, to 
glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you 
are out from under the pine trees, and a 

259 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes 
overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for 
by this time your wooden steed is speed- 
ing like the wind, and you are spinning 
round a corner, and the whole glittering 
valley and all the lights in all the great hotels 
lie for a moment at your feet; and the next 
you are racing once more in the shadow of 
the night with close-shut teeth and beating 
heart. Yet a little while and you will be 
landed on the highroad by the door of your 
own hotel. This, in an atmosphere tingling 
with forty degrees of frost, in a night made 
luminous with stars and snow, and girt with 
strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an 
unaccustomed tune and adds a new excite- 
ment to the life of man upon his planet. 




260 




IV 

THE STIMULATION OF THE 
ALPS 

^O any one who should come from a 
southern sanitarium to the Alps, the 
row of sun-burned faces round the 
table would present the first surprise. He 
would begin by looking for the invalids, and 
he would lose his pains, for not one out of 
five of even the bad cases bears the mark of 
sickness on his face. The plump sunshine 
from above and its strong reverberation from 
below colour the skin like an Indian climate ; 
the treatment, which consists mainly of the 
open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, 
and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month 
or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters. 
But although he may be thus surprised at the 
first glance, his astonishment will grow 
greater, as he experiences the effects of the 
climate on himself. In many ways it is a try- 
ing business to reside upon the Alps: the 

261 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

stomach is exercised, the appetite often lan- 
guishes; the liver may at times rebel; and 
because you have come so far from metro- 
politan advantages, it does not follow that 
you shall recover. But one thing is undeni- 
able — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and 
blinding hght of Alpine winters, a man takes 
a certain troubled dehght in his existence 
which can nowhere else be paralleled. He 
is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly 
alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of him 
in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthu- 
siasm of the blood unknown in more tem- 
perate climates. It may not be health, but it 
is fun. 

There is nothing more difficult to com- 
municate on paper than this baseless ardour, 
this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joy- 
ousness of spirits. You wake every morning, 
see the gold upon the snow peaks, become 
filled with courage, and bless God for your 
prolonged existence. The valleys are but a 
stride to you; you cast your shoe over the 
hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in 
the words of an unverified quotation from 
the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit "on 
262 



STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 

the wings of all the winds " to *' come fly- 
ing all abroad." Europe and your mind are 
too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it 
is notable that you are hard to root out of 
your bed; that you start forth, singing, in- 
deed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready 
to turn home again; that the best of you is 
volatile; and that although the restlessness 
remains till night, the strength is early at an 
end. With all these heady jollities, you are 
half conscious of an underlying languor in 
the body; you prove not to be so well as 
you had fancied; you weary before you have 
well begun ; and though you mount at morn- 
ing with the lark, that is not precisely a song 
bird's heart that you bring back with you 
when you return with aching limbs and 
peevish temper to your inn. 

It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy 
of Alpine winters is its own reward. Base- 
less, in a sense, it is more than worth more 
permanent improvements. The dream of 
health is perfed while it lasts; and if, in 
trying to realize it, you speedily wear out 
the dear hallucination, still every day, and 
many times a day, you are conscious of a 

263 



ESS A VS AND CRITICISMS 

strength you scarce possess, and a delight 
in living as merry as it proves to be transient. 
The brightness — heaven and earth con- 
spiring to be bright — the levity and quiet 
of the air; the odd stirring silence — more 
stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, 
the enchanted landscape: all have their part 
in the efife6l and on the memory, '" torn 
voiis tapent stir la tete; ' ' and yet when you 
have enumerated all, you have gone no 
nearer to explain or even to qualify the deli- 
cate exhilaration that you feel — delicate, 
you may say, and yet excessive, greater than 
can be said in prose, almost greater than an 
invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of 
France known in England in some gaseous 
disguise, but when drunk in the land of its 
nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, 
and as heady as verse. It is more than prob- 
able that in its noble natural condition this 
was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by 
Athos in the "Musketeers." Now, if the 
reader has ever washed down a liberal sec- 
ond breakfast with the wine in question, and 
gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, 
into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will 
264 



STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 

have felt an influence almost as genial, al- 
though strangely grosser, than this fairy 
titillation of the nerves among the snow and 
sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, 
we need not say of intoxication, but of in- 
sobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong 
sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, 
insubstantial meditations. And whether he 
be really so clever or so strong as he sup- 
poses, in either case he will enjoy his chi- 
mera while it lasts. 

The influence of this giddy air displays 
itself in many secondary ways. A certain 
sort of laboured pleasantry has already been 
recognized, and may perhaps have been re- 
marked in these papers, as a sort peculiar 
to that climate. People utter their judgments 
with a cannonade of syllables; a big word 
is as good as a meal to them; and the turn 
of a phrase goes further than humour or 
wisdom. By the professional writer many 
sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At 
first, he cannot write at all. The heart, it 
appears, is unequal to the pressure of busi- 
ness, and the brain, left without nourish- 
ment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some 

265 



ESS A YS AND CRITICISMS 

power of work returns to him, accompanied 
by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is 
opened, and there pours at once from his 
pen a world of blatant, husthng polysylla- 
bles, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to 
be positively offensive in hot weather. He 
writes it in good faith and with a sense of 
inspiration; it is only when he comes to 
read what he has written that surprise and 
disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he to 
do, poor man ? All his little fishes talk like 
whales. This yeasty inflation, this stiff and 
strutting architecture of the sentence has 
come upon him while he slept; and it is not 
he, it is the Alps, who are to blame. He is 
not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat com- 
forts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. 
Some day, when the spring returns, he shall 
go down a little lower in this world, and 
remember quieter inflections and more mod- 
est language. But here, in the meantime, 
there seems to swim up some outline of a 
new cerebral hygiene and a good time com- 
ing, when experienced advisers shall send 
a man to the proper measured level for the 
ode, the biography, or the religious trad; 
266 



STIMULA TION OF THE ALPS 

and a nook may be found, between the sea 
and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne 
shall be able to write more continently, and 
Mr. Browning somewhat slower. 

Is it a return of youth, or is it a conges- 
tion of the brain } It is a sort of congestion, 
perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all 
goes well, to face the new day with such a 
bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly con- 
gestion that makes night hideous with 
visions, all the chambers of a many-storeyed 
caravanserai, haunted with vociferous night- 
mares, and many wakeful people come 
down late for breakfast in the morning. 
Upon that theory the cynic may explain the 
whole affair — exhilaration, nightmares, 
pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other 
hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood 
may itself be but a symptom of the same 
complaint, for the two efifeds are strangely 
similar; and the frame of mind of the inva- 
lid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent 
youth, with periods of lassitude. The foun- 
tain of Juventus does not play steadily in 
these parts; but there it plays, and possibly 
nowhere else. 

267 



LEJL19 



.-^ 



